Avalanche to Add Sushi to Mining Incentive Program

About a week after revealing its blockchain would be adding DeFi protocols Aave and Curve as part of a new $180 million liquidity mining incentive program, Avalanche will also add Sushi.

“Sushi is a blue-chip DeFi app that has made it a priority to expand to complementary, high-performance networks,” said Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo, director of DeFi at Ava Labs, the company behind the Avalanche blockchain. “The Sushi community is passionate about developing new, better technology, making it a natural fit into the vibrant ecosystem of DeFi users and projects on Avalanche.”

SushiSwap has surpassed $5 billion in asset growth since its launch last August. The upcoming deployment of Sushi on Avalanche will provide DeFi traders access to products with high-yield farming rewards and near-instant finality, the firm said in a release. 

Sushi’s new development, Trident, which the firm has described as the next-generation automated market maker, or AMM, will provide the Avalanche ecosystem with new abilities to maximize yield and efficiency. Such features include a “hybrid pool” that reduces swap price impacts by using a stableswap curve to trade between similar assets. 

Avalanche announced last week the upcoming launch of mining incentive program Avalanche Rush. It was set to provide Avalanche’s native token, AVAX, in initial allocations of $20 million AVAX and $7 million AVAX for Aave and Curve users, respectively.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said last week that DeFi projects that reward participants with valuable digital tokens or other incentives could count as activity to be regulated, the Wall Street Journal reported.

An Avalanche spokesperson told Blockworks that Ava Labs has not had direct conversations with the SEC but continues to monitor all developments at the agency.

“Ava Labs believes that the US should have a leadership role in blockchain from a technology, business and regulatory standpoint and support sensible, comprehensive crypto asset regulation,” the representative said. 

Expanding the program

The Avalanche Foundation and Sushi have each allocated up to $7.5 million of liquidity mining incentives over a three-month period. These incentives will take the form of AVAX and SUSHI rewards, split evenly. An exact date on which the incentives will begin has not yet been announced.

As of Noon eastern on Tuesday, AVAX was priced at $47.86 and had a market capitalization of nearly $8.4 billion, according to CoinGecko. SUSHI, priced at $12.53, had a market cap of about $2.4 billion.

“The Avalanche community is one of the most compelling reasons to align incentives with the Avalanche chain,” Sushi lead contributor 0xMaki said in a statement. “We are a community-driven platform and admire the community focus in the Avalanche ecosystem and look forward to providing them with a positive DeFi experience.”

Though the Sushi decentralized exchange has been deployed across 20 blockchains, Avalanche is one of the few chains to provide SUSHI incentives outside of the Ethereum mainnet, Avalanche noted in a press release.

During the past few weeks, more than $1 billion has transferred from Ethereum to Avalanche over the newly launched Avalanche Bridge, DeMeo told Blockworks. 

Though the firm has said it will look to continue adding DeFi protocols as part of the incentive program, the DeFi director added that it is still to be determined how many.

“In addition to a number of projects already in the pipeline, we are seeing decentralization work in real-time,” DeMeo said. “There are many applications already deploying on the network on their own, and a large number reaching out eager to join Avalanche Rush.”

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