The challenges with Ethereum related to network congestion and high gas fees drive up Avalanche (AVAX) to post stellar growth in recent sessions despite the bearish mood across most of the crypto sector, helping it climb up in rankings to become the 10th largest cryptocurrency. At the time of writing, AVAX/USD is trading at $136.59.

Although Ethereum remains the largest ecosystem supporting decentralized applications (dApps), several developers and users have complained about its slow transaction processing capabilities, high gas fees and high energy consumption, supporting the rise of potential Ethereum killers in the market as the DeFi space explodes. In recent months, we have seen Solana surging in popularity to become one of the most successful blockchains pulling away dApps from the market leader. However, it looks like the search continues for faster, cheaper and more energy efficient blockchain networks to support the dApps.

One of the biggest gainers in recent times is Avalanche, which offers nominal transaction fees and far higher transaction processing speeds than Ethereum. The latest spike in AVAX came after the CEO of Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, Su Zhu, tweeted that he had abandoned Ethereum despite supporting it in the past. This led to an increased demand for alternatives, with Avalanche being one of the biggest gainers as it has received significant investment from Three Arrows Capital previously. In September, the firm had led a $230 million funding round in the blockchain.

Zhu came down hard against the world‘s second largest cryptocurrency, talking about how its high transaction fees prevented newcomers from affording an entry into using Ethereum’s ecosystem. Following his tweet, his company moved nearly $79 million of ETH holdings to crypto exchange FTX. This move reflects an interest in selling off or exchanging ETH holdings for other digital assets on the platform.

To exemplify his point, Uniswap, Ethereum‘s most popular DEX, requires a few minutes and charges up to $100 to perform a swap. On the other hand, Avalanche offers a transaction fee of less than $1 with almost instant settlements while performing swaps.

It offers higher levels of scalability and efficiency by splitting the work performed across three block chains, X, C and P. The C-chain offers support for smart contracts, handling DeFi protocols with a TVL of over $12 billion till date . While this may seem like a small number in comparison to Ethereum’s DeFi TVL of over $170 billion, we see a steady increase in its growth, especially ever since the blockchain launched its liquidity mining program, Rush.

AVAX/USD Technical Analysis

On the H4 price chart of AVAX/USD, moving averages and the MACD are exhibiting a strong bullish bias. Although, the momentum indicator suggests some selling interest.

Avalanche’s price is sitting well above the pivot point at $119.65 and buyers have some way to go about till resistance at $155.69. Keep an uptick in buying pressure as it could take AVAX towards testing this resistance level in the near-term.