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Astar (ASTR) price doubles as the network prepares to add 15 new projects in April

April 1, 2022No Comments

Following the successful completion of its initial parachute auctions, the Polkadot (POINT) has started to gain traction with the cryptocurrency community as early chains begin to connect and integrate with Ethereum (ETH).

Astar (ASTR) is one such Polkadot-based project that ended the month of March on a roll after the multi-chain smart contract platform attracted the attention of retail and institutional crypto investors.

Data of Markets Cointelegraph Pro and TradingView shows that after reaching a low of $0.107 on March 22, the price of ASTR surged 104% to a daily high of $0.208 on April 1, as demand for the token increased 20-fold.

ASTR/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

Three reasons for the rally include the completion of a $22 million funding round, the expansion of the Astar ecosystem through protocol launches and partnerships, and an increase in users and total value locked on the Astar network.

Institutional investors pile up

The development that helped drive the progress Astar has made in 2022 was the successful completion of a $22 million fundraising round on January 28

Fundraising participants included Polychain, Alameda Research, Alchemy Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, and Digital Finance Group, along with multiple angel investors including Dr. Gavin Wood, Richard Ma, and Keisuke Honda.

The fundraising followed the launch of the Astar mainnet on January 17 and will be used to help develop the Astar ecosystem to support both Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and WebAssembly, allowing developers to implement existing Solidity contracts. , as well as native Polkadot smart contracts.

The Astar ecosystem expands

In the months since the launch of its mainnet, Astar has seen multiple projects launch on its network and anticipates adding even more in April.

The project refers to the month of April as โ€œAstar Seasonโ€ because it has plans to launch at least 15 new projects on the network as part of its push to attract new users.

Upcoming releases include decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols like Avault and Alnari Finance, gambling protocol Astar Farms, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) AstridDAO and ADAO.

Astar has also recently revealed a new partnership with Oasys, a layer one blockchain built for game developers.

Related: Web3: Onboarding the Next Billion Users: The Way Ahead

TVL network soars

A third factor driving Astar's momentum has been the entry of new users into the ecosystem, which now has more than 100,000 unique wallet addresses.

As a result of the influx of new users and the launch of multiple projects on the network, the total value pinned on Astar reached a new all-time high of $1.16 billion on April 1. according to Defi Llama data.

Total value locked in the Astar Network. Source: Defi Llama

Recent growth has given Astar the largest TVL of all Polkadot parachains and helped it become the eighth EVM-compliant chain ranked by TVL.

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