• Cryptocurrency custodian BitGo has announced that it will now support Avalanche, leading to its listing on Bitstamp and Bitbuy exchanges.
  • The Bank of America released a report calling Avalanche a viable alternative for Ethereum as AVAX led the top 100 coins for gains in the past week.

In a week when Bitcoin, Ethereum and most top coins have either dipped or traded sideways, one Ethereum competitor has been soaring. Avalanche had a great week and saw the second-highest gains in the top 100 coins. This was after one of the largest cryptocurrency custodians added support for AVAX and the Bank of America touted it as a viable alternative to Ethereum.

Avalanche is trading at $115 at press time, up by over 8 percent in the past day. In the past week, it has gained 38 percent, with only Yearn Finance at 41 percent having gained more in the top 100.

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Avalanche is now in the top 10 coins by market capitalization at $28.1 billion, ranking just below XRP. Its trading volume has also held up quite well and at over $2.4 billion, it’s higher than Binance Coin, XRP and TRON.

Related: Avalanche (AVAX) is the new don of the DeFi town, here’s everything about it

A great week for Avalanche

The price rise is no fluke for Avalanche. In the past week, the cryptocurrency project has received a big boost from positive developments and partnerships.

The biggest was an announcement by BitGo which revealed that it will add support for AVAX. BitGo is one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency custodians with over $64 billion in assets under management. It was acquired by Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital for $1.2 billion earlier this year and since then, it has added more than $24 billion to its AUM. It services over 400 institutional clients and over 150 exchanges.

John Wu, the president of Ava Labs, the developers of Avalanche, commented:

Not only is BitGo trusted and allows us to provide more access to our native tokens on Avalanche, but given the enterprise push, and the institutional support of Avalanche, this really is a very powerful company to partner with.

BitGo was just as excited about adding AVAX to its list of supported cryptocurrencies. In a statement, CEO Mike Belshe said that his company was attracted to the project following its explosive growth over the last year. in which it has gained over 3,400 percent.

He commented:

Institutional investors can now access AVAX within the most secure custody offering on the market and tens of millions of retail users have the potential to gain secure access through the exchanges and platforms powered by our technology.

With the integration, exchanges which rely on BitGo will be able to easily list AVAX, the CEO revealed. The first two are Bitstamp and Bitbuy which will list AVAX in early 2022.

Avalanche is emerging as one of the best upcoming Ethereum competitors. The Bank of America this week described it as a viable Ethereum alternative for its scaling capability through its subnet feature.

“Subnets enable faster time-to finality (settlement) and lower costs than alternative blockchains with the validation of around 4,500 transactions per second,” the bank’s report said.

According to DeFi Llama, Avalanche has the fifth-highest total value locked (TVL) in the DeFi world. At $11.85 billion, it’s within touching distance of Solana’s $11.87 billion and twice as much as sixth-placed TRON at $5.38 billion.