New discovery! AVAX is the native token for Avalanche ecosystem. Why AVAX? They are in the phase of bringing in huge names (Aave and Curve) onboard, with a hefty USD180m incentive program known as Avalanche Rush (refer to https://medium.com/avalancheavax/avalanche-foundation-announces-180m-defi-incentive-program-d320fdfafff7). This program is just announced today on their Medium site and Twitter.

Why Benqi? Benqi, a protocol on Avalanche is launching on 19 August (yes you see it right, tomorrow), and is backed by Avalanche team themselves (refer to https://benqifinance.medium.com/?p=6b755b1b22b9 for more details). It has recently raised USD6m from VCs, and has being allocated USD3m from the Avalanche incentive program (refer to https://medium.com/avalancheavax/benqi-and-avalanche-launch-3m-liquidity-mining-initiative-to-accelerate-defi-growth-2c16f78b903d for more details). USD3m incentive looks small compared to the other established protocols but it speaks volume of the potential Avalanche sees in this new protocol.

There's so many ecosystems available now, you may ask, what's special about Avalanche? The Avalanche team is promoting the fact that transaction fees are burned instead of being paid to miners, which increases the scarcity of the token. Another point is the almost-instantaneous transaction processing. Burning reminds you of the increasing gas fees in Ethereum? Yeah me too. Coupled with the fact that AVAX has a fixed supply unlike ETH, I don't see how this keeps it low in gas fee (and as such, friendly to people with low-capital which is the vast majority) but we'll see in the long term how this plays out when this ecosystem matures. 

Before we get ahead of ourselves, guess who's already here? Beefy, the auto-compounding protocol which has presence in multiple chains/ecosystems. Extract from RugDoc: https://rugdoc.io/chain/avalanche/ 

Below are the steps on the bridge process. Once again do note that this is not financial advice, please do your own research.

Steps:

1. Set-up Avalanche mainnet in Metamask - https://chainlist.org/ (super helpful setup without manual keying the fields in Metamask, just search for your mainnet and click a few buttons)

2. Bridging of assets from Ethereum (no escaping the crazy fees) to Avalanche - https://bridge.avax.network/ 

• Best part? By using this bridge, Avalanche is airdropping you some AVAX (0.1 AVAX to be exact) for gas fees for transfers above USD75.
• Fee schedules on Avalanche as per: https://docs.avax.network/learn/platform-overview/transaction-fees 

3. Add the transferred assets (in the example below, it's DAI.e) in your wallet

• Click on the "Make sure the token is added to your wallet." once you have been directed to the new page after bridging

• Click on the Metamask logo on the right hand side for the wrapped token

4. Explore the Avalanche ecosystem - https://ecosystem.avax.network/marketplace?tag=defi 

5. Swap for your desired assets - https://app.pangolin.exchange/ 

• In the bottom of the screen, it may be showing Top 15 tokens. Please swap it to AVAX Bridge Tokens if you're following the above steps to get onto Avalanche.

Some screenshots for your reference:

Extract of my actual transfer-in-progress - one of the sleekest-looking bridge!

The site directs you to the new page upon completion of the bridge (which took me around 5 minutes), and has credited me with 0.1AVAX (we'll see how many transactions this can last me). 

And now what? I will wait for the launch of those protocols. If you have more capital to play with, please do explore the existing protocols and share your experience in the comments below! Happy to hear from others in this journey.