EVM - 8. Up The Mountain

An Avalanche has been building up steam as of late — the price of AVAX rose by nearly 100% in the month of January and BTC hodlers have been moving holdings to the Avalanche chain. What’s been fueling this growth over the past month — and what does the future hold for Avalanche? Will this growth continue into the new year? Or will growth stagnate as 2023 continues to progress?

Overview

Once of the main reasons of the AVAX price surge can be attributed to the following fact:

> The number of bitcoin (BTC) bridged or ported from the Bitcoin blockchain to the Avalanche smart contract blockchain has surpassed the tally of coins held in the Lightning Network, a second-layer solution for Bitcoin's scalability problems. > > On Tuesday, the total circulating supply of bridged BTC, or BTC.b, on Avalanche rose to a record 5,700 BTC ($118.6 million), according to data sourced from Dune Analytics. Meanwhile, the number of bitcoin locked in the Lightening Network stood at 4,929 BTC ($100 million). [1]
Here is some more information on what the Native Support for BTC on AVAX means -
Making this as the basis of the analysis, we dive deeper into following:
- Price of $AVAX vs $BTC
- Avalanche Bridge: Bitcoin - Bridging Metrics
- $BTC → $AVAX Swaps

Contract used

'0x152b9d0fdc40c096757f570a51e494bd4b943e50' -- BTC.b
'0xb31f66aa3c1e785363f0875a1b74e27b85fd66c7' -- WAVAX
'0xf5163f69f97b221d50347dd79382f11c6401f1a1' -- (Avalanche Bridge: Bitcoin)
origin_function_signature = '0xa888d914' -- MINT

Will this growth continue into the new year? Or will growth stagnate as 2023 continues to progress?

As per the analysis, the way AVAX has delivered over the past 4 years and given the BTC community now trusts Avalanche community the bridging transactions being the proof.
Given all these positives, AVAX is surely bound to grow in 2023 when the bull run starts.
If the market tanks again then AVAX might go down with it, but builders keep building and AVAX has a bright future.

Price of $AVAX vs $BTC

AVAX has really almost mirrored the price of BTC since Jan 2023 as per the price chart.
Looking at the daily change in price, Jan 12, 2023 stands out where AVAX rose 16% in a single day vs 4.8% for BTC.
Also this is time right when the BTC.b overtook lightning network -

Avalanche Bridge: Bitcoin - Bridging Metrics

Looking at the bridge metrics, there is nothing special in the number of transactions, except Feb 1, 2023 where we see a huge spike.
On Feb 1, 2023 110 bridging transactions took place for a total of 1,026 BTC or 23.7M $USD by a total of 82 wallets.
The volume has been only the rise overall since the beginning of Jan 2023.

$BTC → $AVAX Swaps

Another reason for rise in price of AVAX could be that the BTC being bridged is being swapped to AVAX.
Jan 27 did see a spike in the number of $BTC → $AVAX Swaps, with 238 swaps for a total of 7.1K $BTC swapped to 131K $AVAX for a total of 6M $USD on a single day.
That day did see another 10% rise in price right around the time.
The number of swaps have gone down lately though.