Blockchain project Avalanche raises $42 million in a public token sale

Blockchain project Avalanche, spearheaded by Cornell computer science professor Emin Gün Sirer, raised $42 million in a public token sale last week.

The amount was collected in just under 4.5 hours on July 15, AVA Labs announced on Wednesday. There were 72 million Avalanche (AVAX) tokens available for sale, and investors from 100 countries grabbed all of it. Some of the funds also came from Ethereum’s Genesis address.

"It's clear that the market was craving a project of this caliber," said John Wu, president of Ava Labs. "The success and velocity of the Avalanche sale is a testament to the quality of our project, and the impact it can have on both institutional and decentralized finance."

The funds have been raised by the Avalanche Foundation and its affiliates. AVAX tokens will be distributed to investors when the Avalanche mainnet launches, which is expected to go live by the end of August.

The tokens are currently not listed on any crypto exchange, but will be made available for trading in the future, said AVA Labs.

The public token sale brings AVA's total funding to date to $60 million. Last month, the project raised $12 million in a private token sale and had previously raised $6 million from prominent venture firms, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

The AVA network claims to outclass Ethereum 2.0 when it launches. Sirer recently told The Block that the network will be able to achieve not only higher throughput (the number of transactions that a network can process per second) but also lower latency (the time it takes for nodes to agree that a transaction is valid).

This report has been updated for clarity.