Blockchain project AVA raises $12 million in a private token sale

AVA, the blockchain project by Cornell computer science professor Emin Gün Sirer, has raised $12 million from major investors in a private token sale.

Galaxy Digital, Bitmain, Initialized Capital, NGC Ventures, Dragonfly Capital and “dozens of other individuals” participated in the private sale of AVAX tokens. The funds have been raised by the Avalanche Foundation and its affiliates.

Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder and COO of AVA Labs, told The Block that the fresh capital will go towards further development of the AVA blockchain network. Its mainnet is on track to launch in July, said Sekniqi.

The AVA blockchain network, based on the Avalanche consensus protocol, claims to outclass Ethereum 2.0 when it launches. Sirer recently told The Block that AVA will be able to achieve not only higher throughput (the number of transactions that a network can process per second) but also lower latency (the time it takes for nodes to agree that a transaction is valid).

Ethereum currently processes around 10 to 20 transactions per second (TPS). ETH 2.0 hopes to multiply that number by 64 times. Sirer at the time said AVA’s testnet already reaches 6500 TPS. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued that “Ethereum has also seen up to 1000 TPS in test environments; there are reasons why it only supports ~40 TPS on mainnet.”

Sekniqi today told The Block that AVA’s TPS on mainnet is estimated to be “in the four-digit range.” 

The private token sale brings the Avalanche Foundation’s total amount of funding raised to date to $18 million. Last year, the foundation raised $6 million from prominent venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain and investors like Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant, among others.

Avalanche and its affiliates are now also conducting a public sale of its tokens under Reg. D Rule 506(c) and Regulation S of the Securities Act. All investors must be “accredited investors” and must not be a “U.S. Person,” per these regulations.

The public token sale begins on July 8 and will run for at least two weeks, Sekniqi told The Block, adding: “A total of 7 million Avalanche tokens will be available for eligible participants to purchase. If the full 7 million is sold within the first week, a second allotment of 5 million tokens will be made available to the public.”