Avalanche (AVAX) seems to be making gains despite most of its peers trading in the red, with traders turning upbeat about the potential Ethereum killer on the back of the upcoming Avalanche Summit scheduled to be held in late March. At the time of writing, AVAX/USD is trading at around $67.28.

The summit, slated March 22-27 in Barcelona, Spain will offer updates from developers on the the network, dApps and their future. In addition, the event will also have a hackathon lasting from March 25 to March 27, which can bump up the number of potential projects going live on the blockchain in the coming months.

Even as the DeFi market across most blockchain ecosystems gathered losses for the week, Avalanche was one blockchain which enjoyed a strong growth in its DeFi TVL over the past week. According to data on DeFi Llama, the network’s DeFi apps saw their total value locked rise by nearly 12% in the past seven days.

There is also considerable excitement among the Avalanche community following the first ever DAO merger within its ecosystem. Snowball’s community voted to add Teddy within its ecosystem. The Teddy Stable Dollar (TSD) is a stablecoin within the blockchain and this DAO merger will help in making the token Avalanche’s native stablecoin, similar to MakerDAO and DAI for Ethereum.

According to a post shared by Ava Labs’ CEO Emin Gün Sirer, Avalanche is catching up to its key rival in terms of transaction volume. Late last week, the network handled 1.1 million transactions, which was around 96% of what Ethereum had handled during the period. However, what’s interesting is that the average gas fees on Avalanche stood at around $0.23, well below Ethereum’s average of $62.

AVAX/USD Technical Analysis

According to a recent forecast by popular crypto strategist and analyst Michaël van de Poppe, Avalanche’s AVAX could experience quite a rally once its price cracks the key resistance at $80. He recommends that it’s a good time to buy into the crypto until this happens.

On the H4 price chart of AVAX/USD, moving averages and popular technical indicators MACD and momentum are exhibiting a strong bearish bias. Avalanche’s price is above the pivot point at $65.58 although it is in danger of being tested soon.

In case this level breaks down, we need to keep a close watch on the immediate support at $57.58. However, if the market sentiment picks up, we could see AVAX head higher instead, in which case we need to see if buyers manage to break past resistance at $75.98.