AVAX and NEAR rise together, is it capital outflow or a revival of the public chain narrative?

Written by: shushu

Source: BlockBeats

Since the crypto market entered a bull market, few established public chains from the last cycle, such as Near and Fantom, have shown significant progress, except for Solana and Avalanche. However, recently, as Bitcoin broke new highs, the native token prices of these public chains have gradually become active. Among them, FTM has repeatedly attracted smart money inflows in the past few days, while NEAR has also reached a new high for the year amid the recent AI craze.

Riding the AI Wave, "Conference Expectations" Help NEAR Ecosystem Thaw

NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin announced that he will attend the "Transforming AI" keynote speech and panel discussion during the GTC24 conference on March 20, with NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang also participating in the session. After this news was announced, NEAR briefly broke $5 and has surpassed $8 as of the time of writing.

In February 2023, Near stated that NEAR could serve as infrastructure to support the next generation of AI use cases, creating a value layer for setting rules and data pricing, allowing different applications and protocols to utilize this data in a public, fair, and transparent manner. Near has also partnered with consumer shopping data analysis platform Cosmose AI to establish a stablecoin payment system, allowing users to shop with cryptocurrencies at lower transaction fees.

Meanwhile, the meme coin BLACKDRAGON in the ecosystem has "revived" once again, rising 700% from its bottom, with a price of $0.0(7)8 as of the time of writing, and a 24-hour increase of 15%.

Gaming + Meme Coin, Avalanche Ecosystem Sees General Surge

On March 11, South Korean game publisher Nexon Group announced that its 2D massively multiplayer online role-playing game "MapleStory" will officially enter the Avalanche network in collaboration with Ava Labs, launching a Web3 version called "MapleStory Universe." Since its launch in 2003, "MapleStory" has been one of the earliest online games to popularize the free-to-play model and has expanded to servers in the United States, Europe, and other Asian countries like Japan and China, claiming to have over 180 million users in its 20-year history.

The first game, "MapleStory N," will allow players to create their own game worlds and earn Web3 rewards for doing so. Although the announcement did not specify what kind of Web3 incentives players would receive, its website noted that NFTs are at the core of its value ecosystem. Nexon expects the PC version of "MapleStory N" to launch on the Avalanche network by the end of this year.

Earlier, the Avalanche Labs development team released the Durango upgrade and launched "Teleporter" to enhance interoperability within its subnet ecosystem. At this juncture, the launch of a well-known game's Web3 version has generally led to considerable increases in its ecosystem tokens. As of the time of writing, AVAX is priced at $54.55, with a 24-hour increase of 15.88%; Gamer Arena (GAU) is currently priced at $0.11, with a 24-hour increase of 41.5%; Joe (JOE) is currently priced at $0.7372, with a 24-hour increase of 16.3%.

Similar to Near, meme coins on Avalanche have also revived, with COQ rising over 300% from its bottom. As of the time of writing, COQ is priced at $0.0(5)58, with a 24-hour increase of 3%.

Backed by Telegram, Market Anticipates TON Listing on Binance

Another established Layer 1 public chain, TON, has also seen significant gains due to Telegram's "activity."

On February 28, Telegram officially announced that its advertising platform would be opened to nearly a hundred new countries for all advertisers, with channel owners in these countries receiving 50% of the revenue from ads displayed on their channels. The official statement indicated that to ensure fast and secure ad payments and withdrawals, the TON blockchain would be specifically used, and the revenue would be shared with channel owners, creating a virtuous cycle where content creators could cash out their Toncoin or reinvest it to promote and upgrade their channels.

After the announcement, TON briefly surged over 27%, and as of the time of writing, its price is $4.39, with a 24-hour increase of 29.5%.

On March 1, Binance launched TON 1-50x USDT perpetual contracts, which also raised expectations for Binance to list TON spot trading, further driving the price increase.

Smart Money Flows into FTM, Ecosystem Worth Watching

Since March, smart money has repeatedly flowed into Fantom's native token FTM. On March 3, according to Nansen data, FTM, MKR, and ZETA topped the Smart Money 24-hour inflow list, with FTM seeing an inflow of approximately $1.53 million. The next day, FTM briefly broke $0.7, with a 24-hour increase of 30.56%. According to Spot On Chain monitoring, a whale that purchased 4.71 million FTM (approximately $2.69 million) through Gemini and Airswap two days prior had already made a profit of $600,000 within two days.

On March 5, FTM again became a major destination for smart money inflows, with approximately $1.79 million flowing in that day, ranking alongside RNDR and BEAM on the Smart Money 24-hour inflow list. As of the time of writing, FTM is priced at $0.83, with a 24-hour increase of 2.5%.