Author: Zen, PANews

Over the past year, the narrative of the crypto market has quietly shifted: from a simple pursuit of price to an institutionalized competition centered on how to bring capital onto blockchains, tokenize assets, and access compliant funds. Traditional financial processes and rules are gradually being embedded in the public blockchain world. Whoever is quicker to connect compliant funds, real assets, and industry traffic to blockchains will have a better chance of securing a niche in the next cycle.

Avalanche is one of the most active players in this race. On the one hand, it is improving performance and developer experience through the Octane upgrade and subnet expansion. On the other hand, it is collaborating with RWA (Real Assets on Chain) by introducing a "public company treasury" with AVAX as its core exposure, bridging Wall Street's capital and rules to the chain through tokenization.

AVAX treasury launches with expected capital exceeding US$1 billion

AgriFORCE Growing Systems (NASDAQ: AGRI), a small publicly traded company formerly engaged in agricultural technology and later transformed into Bitcoin mining, recently announced that it would change its name to "AVAX One" and plan to raise approximately $550 million from external investors to acquire AVAX tokens worth more than $700 million.

AGRI has successfully raised approximately $300 million in PIPEs (public offerings for private investment) to date. The financing was led by Hivemind Capital and participated by more than 50 institutional and crypto-native investors, including ParaFi, Galaxy Digital, Digital Currency Group, Kraken, Cypher Capital, Big Brain Holdings, FalconX, Republic Digital, Borderless Capital, Summer Capital, GSR Ventures, FintechCollective, Bastion Trading, CMCC Global Titan Fund, Hypersphere, Fifth Lane Capital, HashKey Capital, etc.

More notably, Matt Zhang, founder of lead investor Hivemind Capital, is expected to serve as chairman of the company. Anthony Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital, will lead AGRI's advisory board, assisting the company with fundraising and marketing. The board also includes Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, and other prominent financial industry figures to be announced.

In addition to AGRI, another digital asset treasury listed company dedicated to holding AVAX tokens is expected to be established next month. The Avalanche Foundation was disclosed in the middle of this month that it is promoting two financing rounds totaling approximately US$1 billion. The two financings will be used to purchase AVAX tokens at a discount from the Avalanche Foundation in order to establish two crypto treasury companies in the United States and strengthen AVAX's market foundation.

The first deal involves AGRI, which has already begun raising an additional $250 million. The second, led by renowned crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly, will raise at least $500 million through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

Can the AVAX treasury strategy work?

Avalanche's Treasury Company strategy brings long-term funding and real asset backing to Avalanche. The participation of strong institutional investors in AVAX demonstrates their confidence in the ecosystem and is expected to enhance AVAX's influence in terms of market capitalization and application.

On the other hand, many research institutions and observers have questioned the sustainability of this strategy. Indeed, AGRI's (AVAX One) upward trend was short-lived. On the first trading day following the announcement of its transformation, AGRI's stock opened higher, soaring 134% intraday and ending the day up 142.98%. However, the company's stock price subsequently declined, falling from $5.73 to $3.52 by September 26th.

A September report from K33 Research indicates that approximately a quarter of publicly traded companies holding Bitcoin currently have stock market capitalizations below the book value of their crypto holdings. K33 analyst Vetle Lunde noted that this "market capitalization below assets" situation means that companies issuing new shares to raise funds for cryptocurrency purchases are effectively selling equity at a discount, potentially underperforming in the long run. Frequent share issuances dilute existing shareholders, coupled with the potential risks of highly concentrated assets in specific currencies, often limit the ability of these treasury companies to raise funds through subsequent financing.

K33 data also shows that as of September, the average premium multiple of crypto treasury companies' stock prices relative to their holdings (mNAV) had fallen from 3.76 in April to 2.8. Most small and medium-sized companies are trading at a discount, with only leading companies like MicroStrategy still trading at a premium. This suggests that the market is becoming more rational about the "listed companies hoarding cryptocurrencies" model, and is no longer blindly chasing after concepts.

Lunde said the recent compression in treasury companies' share price premiums is a "return to rationality," as these operations often involve high advisory fees, insider incentives, and complex capital structures, which have overdrawn market patience. Unless these companies can integrate their crypto holdings into their core businesses and generate actual returns, simply hoarding cryptocurrencies will not create new value.

Many industry analysts have also reminded investors on social media to be wary of some treasury stories of "buying coins and speculating in stocks" because their essence is to use the popularity of the crypto market to arbitrage in the traditional market. They are highly reflexive and speculative. Once the crypto market reverses, the company's fundamentals are insufficient to support it, and both stock and token prices may fall.

In fact, even the industry benchmark MicroStrategy's current stock price premium to the company's net asset value of Bitcoin has fallen to about 1.26 times, hitting a new low since March 2024. This shows that even the market recognition of the leading "Bitcoin Vault" is declining, let alone whether the new AVAX Treasury company can gain long-term favor.

RWA leads the Avalanche ecosystem into the acceleration zone

However, over the past six months, the Avalanche blockchain ecosystem has demonstrated significant growth in DeFi, on-chain transactions, stablecoins, and real-world asset tokenization (RWA). The establishment of a crypto treasury company focused on the AVAX token has only fueled this momentum.

In the second quarter of this year, Avalanche completed its Octane upgrade, significantly optimizing network performance and costs. Average C-Chain transaction fees decreased by approximately 43% quarter-over-quarter. This upgrade directly resulted in a surge in on-chain activity: the average daily transaction count in Q2 increased to approximately 10.1 million, a 169.9% increase from the previous quarter. The average daily active addresses exceeded 519,000, a 210% increase quarter-over-quarter.

Entering the third quarter, Avalanche on-chain transactions and DeFi activity continued to rise. In early September 2025, Avalanche's decentralized exchange (DEX) saw daily trading volume approach $900 million, a new high since March and ranking sixth among all blockchain networks. According to DeFiLlama data, on September 24th, Avalanche DEX's daily trading volume peaked at $1.17 billion.

Meanwhile, Avalanche is rapidly becoming a leading platform for tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs). September data shows that the market capitalization of tokenized physical assets deployed on the Avalanche network has exceeded $450 million, a 139% increase in just one month.

The most notable of these were the US Dollar Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) under global asset management giant BlackRock, and Scaramucci's announcement that $300 million of shares in a hedge fund under SkyBridge would be tokenized and issued on Avalanche via the Tokeny platform.

Avalanche has also made progress in the field of compliant stablecoins. In August, Wyoming, the United States, launched the first state government-backed stablecoin, Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), which was issued on seven blockchains including Avalanche.

In terms of on-chain transactions and settlements, in July this year, payment giant Visa announced that it would connect the Avalanche and Stellar networks to its cross-border stablecoin settlement platform, enabling PayPal's US dollar stablecoin (PYUSD), Global Dollar (USDG) and Circle's euro stablecoin (EURC) to be cleared through Avalanche.

As the ecosystem flourishes, institutional investors are closely watching Avalanche. Several asset managers have applied to launch Avalanche-based trading products: Grayscale, the world's largest crypto asset management company, and Bitwise recently submitted applications to the US SEC for spot Avalanche ETFs. VanEck also applied to the SEC for an Avalanche ETF in March of this year.

Overall, the effectiveness of treasury companies' strategies remains to be seen. Market reactions are often short-lived, but long-term performance depends on the overall crypto market trends and the execution capabilities of these treasury companies. Regardless of the short-term fluctuations of treasury stocks, the fundamental logic and key focus of Avalanche's current strategy lies in connecting traditional capital with on-chain applications.