This Week in Avalanche, Jan 15 2021

Avalanche Major News

• AvalancheGo v1.1.2 released - patch includes bug fixes and performance improvements

• Chainlink awarded a blockchain integration grant to Protofire
  for the native Chainlink integration on Avalanche

• Learn about the upcoming Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge by watching this presentation by Leart Ulaj at ETHCON Korea

Staking (P-Chain)

• How to Run Avalanche at Home: Getting Started - YouTube tutorial by FireStorm

• Stats:

  • 71.3% staking ratio (256,683,898 AVAX) ↑ 1.3% from last week

  • ~9.97% current staking reward per year

  • 730 Validators - ↑ 38 from last week

Asset Layer (X-Chain)

• The X-Chain passed 1 million total transactions!

• Emin & Ted Yin have been using AVAX to make everyday purchases

• 912 assets have been issued on the X-chain - ↑ 53 from last week

DApp Layer (C-Chain)

• On-Chain activity is picking up - The explorer shows an increasing number of contract calls & ERC20 transfers.

Stuff for Devs

• Avalanche is now available on the SIMBA Chain Platform.

• snowplow - a quick and easy tool for running and monitoring an avalanche validator by Patrick O’Grady

• Avalanche Forum: Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge Questions

Ecosystem

• Prosper and Reef Finance conducted AMAs in the Avalanche telegram group

• Avascan now have 50,000 monthly users! Read about their 2021 plans here

• Several fun bounties have been offered to future validators:

  • Don Wonton will donate 7.77 AVAX to validator #777

  • Ricardo Vázquez will donate 8.88 AVAX to validator #888

  • Nicolas Lemaitre will donate 100 AVAX 🤯 to validator #1000

• Patrick O'Grady has joined Ava Labs from Coinbase, read his excellent tweet thread about why he decided to make the move.

• Avalanche Hub have been putting out promotional / educational videos

Podcasts, Interviews & Misc

• PBWS2020_Tech Update: what did we build in 2020? - panel featuring Emin

• In terms of number of validators Avalanche performs very well compared to other networks. Read Emin’s thoughts on what this does and does not mean for network security.

Upcoming Dates

• Dec 14 - Jan 17: Encode Hackathon

• Mar 9: Crowdsale AVAX tokens unlock

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