Emin Gün Sirer, Cofounder of Avalanche. Photographer: Matthew Busch/Bloomberg

It’s starting to feel like 2021 again—at least for the British Virgin Islands-based Avalanche Foundation.

British Virgin Islands-based Avalanche Foundation has raised $250 million via a private token sale for its blockchain platform.

The lead investors are Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly, and ParaFi Capital, with over 40 other firms joining in the effort. Among them are SkyBridge and Morgan Creek Digital, who apparently believe the market is warming up enough for a big swing.

However, the Avalanche Foundation maintains that its primary goal is not to raise funds. According to Forbes' estimates, its treasury currently holds about $3 billion worth of its own AVAX token.

“The primary goal was to get alignment and incentivize the right kinds of partners to build with,” said Avalanche cofounder Emin Gün Sirer.

This is not Avalanche's first major fundraising endeavor. At the height of the last crypto bull run in December 2021, the foundation raised $230 million in a similarly splashy token sale.

On December 16, Avalanche will launch “Avalanche9000,” its most ambitious upgrade to date. The update promises to drastically reduce the costs associated with launching blockchains within its ecosystem.

Previously, setting up a node required an upfront payment of 2,000 AVAX, which amounted to a significant sum, given that the token was trading at $48 as of December 11.

Under the new system, validators will pay 1.33 AVAX per month on a subscription-like basis.

The upgrade is designed to support Avalanche's multi-chain vision, which is founded on the belief that one size does not fit all.

“A single chain cannot cater to all use cases, no matter how fast you make it. The only winning architecture is multi-chain,” Gün Sirer explained. “Horizontal scaling that we can enjoy is fundamentally different from Ethereum, Solana and others.”

This approach appears to be yielding results. Developed on Avalanche's infrastructure, the battle royale game “Off The Grid” became the most popular free-to-download game in the Epic Games store just three days after its early access release in October.

In the financial sector, BlackRock's USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), which is the world's largest tokenized fund with a market capitalization of $561.5 million, initially launched on Ethereum but now operates on Avalanche as well, along with Franklin Templeton's OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund.

Additionally, ParaFi Capital, one of the lead investors in the raise, also tokenized a portion of its venture fund on Avalanche in September.

“We are a large institutional player that wants to do business with other like-minded people,” said Jason Urban, global head of trading at Galaxy, emphasizing the strategic importance of the deal. “By broadening Avalanche's reach among institutional investors, we're accelerating its capacity for innovation and scalability” (Approximately half of the investors in the raise are counterparties of Galaxy).

Meanwhile, Dragonfly’s managing partner Haseeb Qureshi highlighted potential regulatory clarity under the Trump administration as a catalyst for the next wave of crypto adoption.

“Avalanche is positioning itself for the opening of floodgates for new entrants,” Qureshi stated. “Build-outs of this scale, especially for traditional companies, require significant resources.”