SushiSwap is expanding to Avalanche after taking top DEX spot

The Uniswap fork will join the likes of Aave and Chainlink which have expanded to Avalanche following the launch of the Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge

Avalanche revealed yesterday on their blog that automated market-making (AMM) decentralised exchange (DEX) SushiSwap was expanding to join the Avalanche ecosystem.

SushiSwap launched in August 2020 as a fork of Uniswap that introduced improvements such as stronger governance rights for its community and enhanced incentives for liquidity providers. This allowed it to poach many of Uniswap’s users and SushiSwap recently overtook Uniswap to become the largest DEX by liquidity in the decentralised finance (DeFi) sector with $4.6 billion in total value locked (TVL).

However, DeFi applications are almost exclusively built on the Ethereum blockchain, and as they attract more and more users, the network gets congested and gas fees increase – the average transaction fee on the Ethereum network is currently about $20.

In contrast to Avalanche, transactions are settled at near-instant finality for a fraction of the cost, making it an attractive destination for DeFi apps that want to scale and perform efficiently without overcharging their users.

Indeed, the launch of the Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge (AEB) last month means that Ethereum-based assets such as Aave, Chainlink and Wrapped Bitcoin are already available on Avalanche. The network has also experienced a boom in smart contract activity since the AEB roll-out, with Avalanche now having over 39,000 unique wallets and more than 626,000 transactions, representing increases of 1,752% and 1,051% respectively.

Chief Technology Officer of SushiSwap, Joseph Delong, said of the announcement, “We look forward to our deployment of Sushi on Avalanche as an important step towards TVL, liquidity, and volume expansion.”

The Avalanche ecosystem seems to be ever expanding – just this month it has integrated smart contract platform SIMBA Chain and stablecoin TrueUSD, among others – and shows no signs of slowing down.

Avalanche is aiming to improve the experience of DeFi users through yet more application integrations. In fact, just over the last three weeks, the total value locked within AMMs on the Avalanche network has grown from $102 million to $275 million – a rise of 169%.