Avalanche Rush to give out more than 180M in DeFi incentives

Smart contract platform Avalanche has announced a $180 million liquidity mining incentive program, named Avalanche Rush. The program aims to encourage more applications and tokens to move to Avalanche’s decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, according to the release.

It’s set to follow a multi-stage deployment starting with the Aave and Curve protocols, before expanding to other assets in the coming months. For this first stage, Avalanche will allocate up to $20M AVAX tokens for Aave and $7M AVAX tokens for Curve over a 3 month period. At the same time, the Avalanche Foundation will sponsor the launch of Benqi’s DeFi protocol native to the Avalanche network with a $3M allocation starting August 19.

News of the Rush program follows the re-release of the Avalanche Bridge — an upgraded version of the project’s previous cross-chain bridging tool that is allegedly five times cheaper, faster and more secure than before.

Part of the funds allocated to the Rush initiative will be reserved for current and future native Avalanche applications, with more information on applying for native incentives said to be coming soon.

Aave Companies founder Stani Kulechov said of the program:

“Avalanche consensus is well suited for building DeFi applications due to its scalability features, particularly its high throughput and near-instant finality.“