• AVAX’s 30% weekly rally is due to growing institutional interest, with Grayscale Investments launching the Grayscale Avalanche Trust and Franklin bringing its money market fund to the Avalanche blockchain.
• Avalanche is making significant progress in decentralized finance (DeFi), introducing native DeFi solutions that enhance cross-chain capabilities.

Avalanche’s native cryptocurrency, AVAX, has been outperforming some of the top altcoins and Bitcoin recently, with more than 30% gains on the weekly chart. As of press time, the AVAX price is trading 8% up at $26.44, with a market cap of $10.7 billion. Its daily trading volumes shot up by 50% to $432 million.

But what’s behind this Avalanche (AVAX) price rally? It turns out that top financial market players like Grayscale Investments and Franklin Templeton have recently announced some interesting updates for the Avalanche ecosystem.

On Thursday, August 22, popular crypto asset manager Grayscale Investments announced the launch of the Avalanche Investment Fund, aka the Grayscale Avalanche Trust. Like other Grayscale funds, the Grayscale Avalanche Trust provides qualified investors indirect exposure to the Avalanche ecosystem and its native token AVAX. The fund has finally gone live for a daily subscription. In its official announcement, Grayscale said:

The Grayscale Avalanche Trust offers investors the opportunity to gain exposure to Avalanche (AVAX), a three-chain smart contract platform designed to simultaneously optimize for scalability, network security, and decentralization.

Well, the launch of the Grayscale Avalanche Trust has got many talking that the asset manager could probably come up with the plan of an AVAX exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the future. The asset manager has already converted two of its trusts—GBTC and ETHE—into spot ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively.

Franklin Templeton Brings Its Tokenized Money Fund to Avalanche (AVAX) Network

One of the top asset managers, Franklin Templeton, is looking to link its popular money market fund – the Franklin Onchain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) – to the Avalanche blockchain network, per the CNF report.

Launched in 2021, the $420 million U.S.-registered mutual fund provides institutional investors with access to the asset manager’s blockchain-based record-keeping system. The fund’s shares are represented by the BENJI Token, currently available for trading on Polygon and Stellar. Investors can purchase these tokenized shares using Circle’s stablecoin, USDC.

On the other hand, Avalanche is also making major strides in the decentralized finance (DeFi) market. Earlier this week, Avalanche announced that Balanced is enhancing the ecosystem’s cross-chain capabilities with native DeFi solutions while eliminating the need for either bridging or wrapping, per the CNF report.

This could also be a major game-changer as it reduces the vulnerability of bridge hacks, which has led to millions of dollars in losses for investors in the past. Thus, the introduction of billions of USD in cross-chain loans on Avalanche marks a significant milestone for the platform and its users.