Avalanche launches Cortina Upgrade, but will things change for AVAX

• AVAX rallied 3.67% over the last 24 hours, at the time of writing.
• The number of transactions across all subnets saw a sharp increase of nearly 46% over the last 10 days.

Avalanche’s [AVAX] much-anticipated Cortina Upgrade was launched on its mainnet, aimed at bringing significant improvements that will enhance the development experience on the layer-1 blockchain.

AVAX reacted positively to the news, jumping 3.67% over the last 24 hours at press time. The token snapped a week-long losing streak during which it shed 19% of its value.

Read Avalanche’s [AVAX] Price Prediction 2023-24

What does Cortina bring to the table?

According to Avalanche, the most important optimization as part of the Upgrade will be the linearization of the X-Chain. Also known as the Exchange Chain, X-Chain is used for sending and receiving funds on the Avalanche network. With the help of linearization, exchanges will find it much simpler to handle the X-Chain.

Secondly, fee distribution for validators with numerous delegators will be made simpler after the Cortina activation. As per the graph below, the number of delegators on the network has increased manifold, with more than 84k, at press time.

Source: Avalanche Explorer

Going forward, fees will be batched over a node’s entire validation period and distributed when it is unstaked rather than being sent as a UTXO for each successful delegation period, thus providing convenience to validators.

Furthermore, Cortina will increase the C-Chain block gas limit to 15M gas, enabling developers to deploy complex dApps. The C-Chain, or the contract chain is used for smart contracts and Defi apps.

Health of the network

The number of transactions on all Avalanche’s subnets saw a sharp increase of nearly 46% over the last 10 days, indicating the growing appeal of the network. The reason behind the spike could be the introduction of Evergreen Subnets launched earlier in the month.

Source: Avalanche Explorer

To add to this, the throughput of the network increased substantially. The average number of transactions processed per second (TPS) increased to 22 from 15 about 10 days ago.

Source: Avalanche Explorer

How much are 1, 10, and 100 AVAXs worth today?

Despite the launch of Cortina, investors were still not ready to place bullish bets on AVAX. More short positions were taken for the token as compared to longs in the last 24 hours, data from Coinglass showed.

Source: Coinglass