The president of the Avalanche (AVAX) development firm Ava Labs is issuing his crypto predictions for 2024.
In the interview with CNBC, Ava Labs president John Wu talks up the Friend.tech challenger Stars Arena, a decentralized social finance application (SocialFi) that launched on the AVAX blockchain in late September.
“We just talked about Stars Arena, and they’re going back online, and we will see one of these SocialFi DApps figure it out. There’s been a couple already, and they’ve had booms and some busts, but sooner or later they’re fixing the business model and it will work well. So that’s one of my predictions.”
Wu also predicts the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will approve a spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF), potentially even in the fourth quarter of 2023.
“When that happens, I anticipate a lot of inflow.”
The SEC delayed decisions on a slew of spot BTC ETF applications, including BlackRock’s, in late September.
The final deadline for the SEC to review one application, the ARK 21 Shares Bitcoin ETF, is on January 10th.
In terms of updates to Avalanche, Wu notes that Ava Labs plans to roll out real-world assets, some of which will be announced in November.
“These are, I think, game-changing developments with… TradFi banks and asset managers. These announcements will be really big, I’m super excited for these institutional, real-world assets being deployed on Avalanche.”
Avalanche is an Ethereum (ETH) rival. The project’s native asset, AVAX, is trading at $8.93 at time of writing.