The social protocol Stars Arena on the Avalanche ecosystem announced on X platform that Arena is preparing to take real financing measures. The founding team from the early days to today has officially identified a company that is ready to enter the seed round of financing, which is a long road. We are working with Avalaunch to provide guidance on the financing process and provide suggestions for building a sustainable economy, while rewarding users and creators in the process of Arena's development. Arena welcomes their support as we take steps to establish ourselves as one of the most influential native cryptocurrency applications.

Blockchain company Lamina1 will collaborate with Avalanche to create an open metaverse. The platform aims to use Avalanche to create an interoperable ecosystem of tools and experiences for the open metaverse. Stephenson stated that Lamina1 does not build everything themselves, but relies on Avalanche's technology, which focuses on enabling blockchain networks for other companies in an open environment. Lamina1 was founded by Stephenson, cryptocurrency pioneer Peter Vessenes, and immersive entertainment executive Rebecca Barkin, with the aim of fostering an open, decentralized, and creator-friendly metaverse.

Ava Labs has hired two former employees of Polygon and OKX to help increase adoption of the Avalanche blockchain in India. Devika Mittal and Kamakshi Arjun have joined Ava Labs as head of India and business development lead for India, respectively.

The Cryptocurrency Carbon Rating Institute (CCRI) recently released its annual PoS benchmark study, which found that despite the introduction of new subnets this year, Avalanche's power consumption has still decreased by 4%. The public blockchain ecosystem of Avalanche only uses 8.2% of the energy consumed by the Ethereum network and only 0.00034% of the energy consumed by the Bitcoin blockchain.

OpenZeppelin Defender has announced its launch on the Avalanche mainnet. OpenZeppelin Defender users can now code, audit, deploy, monitor, and operate blockchain applications on Avalanche. Defender 2.0 is directly integrated into the developer workflow, providing various features aimed at making builders more easily and quickly prevent and fix security issues.

Investment firm VanEck has released a report on the digital asset markets, warning that Ethereum competitor Avalanche is facing significant challenges. VanEck notes that on-chain activity on Avalanche's C-Chain has dropped to critical levels, with fees per day falling by 98.9% from its peak two years ago.

Patrick O'Grady, the Engineering Vice President of Ava Labs, announced in a tweet that Avalanche has released Cortina 11. This version (v1.10.11) is backward compatible with v1.10.0 and is optional, but the team recommends using it. The focus of this release includes ArchiveDB, refactored RewardValidatorTx logic, and a generalized file tracking package.

Avalanche Foundation announced the launch of the Ted Yin Grant Program to recognize Yin Maofan "Ted" Yin's contributions as a computer scientist to the Avalanche public blockchain ecosystem. The Ted Yin Grant Program will advocate for and fund the development of open-source software projects based on the Avalanche public blockchain, contribute to the ecosystem surrounding the Avalanche public blockchain, and/or otherwise benefit public, permissionless blockchains.

NFT marketplace Hyperspace announced its launch on Avalanche, aiming to provide a better trading experience.Hyperspace's Launchpad has successfully operated over 50 NFT projects on Solana and Sui, including ByteCity minted for Bruce Lee.