Avalanche, a decentralized smart contract network, has boomed in recent days, achieving more BTC deposited than the Lightning network.
Recent data shows how the Avalanche bridge surpassed 5,600 BTC deposited, thus surpassing the current capacity of the Lightning network, which is around 5,300 BTC.
Deposits on the Avalanche bridge are used to issue BTC.b, a wrapped token, with 1:1 parity with bitcoin. To issue BTC.b, BTC must first be deposited into a Bitcoin smart contract through the Avalanche bridge.
The amount of BTC.b on Avalanche has been increasing significantly since November 2022. However, just this January 12 the graph shows an exponential increase in the amount of BTC deposited.
This increase coincides with the news that Avalanche finalized a partnership with the Amazon conglomerate, specifically with the AWS web service section. This service makes it easier for people to run Avalanche nodes through Amazon’s servers.
This partnership had repercussions on the price of AVAX, native cryptocurrency of this network, which had an increase in its price of 20%.
So far, BTC.b only had a considerable reduction in liquidity in November last year, which coincides with the bankruptcy of FTX and the general fall of the cryptocurrency markets.
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is a network that functions as a second layer on top of Bitcoin. It allows BTC exchanges to be carried out immediately and with very low commissions, hovering around pennies on the dollar.
While comparing the growth between an Avalanche and Lightning, the growth of one does not detract from the importance of the other, but serves to get an idea of how important this new cryptocurrency network has become within the ecosystem.
In fact its use may be totally different from that of the Lightning network, it runs directly on Bitcoin, while Avalanche is a standalone network.
