$AVAX Yesterday it touched 12.008, the highest since January. It closed back at 11.44, and this morning it’s been hovering around 11.15. What pushed it up was “Goldman Sachs Treasury fund access to Avalanche.” I read through the announcement and several disclosures, and I feel the connection between this news and AVAX is farther apart than everyone thinks.

First, lay out the facts.

On September 28, tZERO and Lynq announced that FTIXX, a U.S. Treasury bond money-market fund with roughly $100 billion under Goldman Sachs, has opened access on Lynq to eligible institutions. Market makers such as B2C2, Wintermute, and Galaxy are all on that platform. Lynq moved to a permissioned Avalanche L1 in April this year.

The details are the real focus. Fund shares are not tokenized, and what’s running isn’t even the C-Chain public chain. The 100 billion figure is the fund’s total size, not the amount of money being moved on-chain. Institutions settle on a private chain; how much trading fees and lock-up demand AVAX can capture from it isn’t mentioned in the announcement.

The evidence held by the longs isn’t empty. Data @avax released on September 28: in the past 7 days, tokenized stock inflows were $131.2 million, mainly coming from Securitize—more than all the other chains combined. Saying that Wall Street is using this chain isn’t wrong by itself.

But if you look further down the same set of data, the outstanding tokenized stocks on Avalanche are about $428 million, still ranking behind BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Solana. Having the #1 weekly inflow and having the #1 outstanding balance are two different things.

There are two more sets of numbers, and I think they explain where AVAX’s buy-side demand is more than Goldman Sachs does.

One is the three US spot AVAX ETFs. In the past 30 days, the total net inflow is only on the order of a few million dollars—over the past week, most trading days are 0. If institutions are truly buying AVAX here to “use this chain,” there should be some movement.

The other is the 8-K filed by Avalanche Treasury Corp (the AVAX treasury company) after US stock market close on September 29: on September 23 it sold, in three tranches, about 2.08 million locked-up AVAX to the Avalanche Foundation, receiving $15 million—about $7.2 per token. The stated purpose is debt repayment and day-to-day operations. That day, spot was between 10 and 11. It’s very normal to sell locked-up tokens at a discount, and it didn’t crash the exchanges—I don’t take it as a negative. Others read it the opposite way: if the foundation is willing to accept it, that suggests it has a bullish view, and that interpretation also makes sense. I only take one thing from it: a company whose main business is holding AVAX is currently short on cash, not short on tokens.

Now going back to earlier. This year around July 12, BlackRock’s BUIDL on Avalanche saw its size jump from $460 million to over $900 million in a single week—at the time, it was also called institutional on-chain. That day AVAX closed at 6.41; one week later it was 6.47; one month later it was 6.32. The money flowed into tokenized T-bill shares—it didn’t turn into buy orders for AVAX.

Back to price. The real push this time started on September 19 and 20, moving from 8.2 all the way to 11.3—back then there was no news about Goldman Sachs yet. Over the following 11 days, AVAX kept ranging between 9.97 and 12.01. Goldman Sachs provided a reason for a rally that had already largely played out. When it surged past 12 yesterday, it got pushed back to 11.4 the same day—so the market is basically pricing that reason in.

On September 20 I said at 10.4 that there are fewer and fewer people chasing it as it reaches the high zone, and the invalidation line was 9.80. Later the low only fell to 9.97—never breaking, and it even touched 12. That line was premature.

My view this time: over the next one or two weeks, it’s more likely to continue grinding between 10 and 12. The probability of a pullback to around 10 is higher than the probability of the daily chart sustaining above 12. Confidence is moderate to low—roughly 55%. On the futures side, total open interest across the whole network is $230–$280 million. Funding rates are slightly positive, not crowded. So I don’t expect a one-shot long squeeze to smash it down; it feels more like a slow bleed.

For those looking to go long, around 11 is the middle of the range—worst odds. If it comes back to the 10.0–10.1 area, watch whether the two lows from September 23 and 24 can hold again. If the daily close falls below 9.95, that range is considered broken. The next reference would be the low from September 20 at 9.44.

What would convince me I was wrong: a daily close above 12 and the next day it doesn’t drop back below 11.5; or those three ETFs showing several days of meaningful net inflows in a row; or Lynq tokenizing the shares and moving them onto C-Chain. If any one of these happens, it would mean the market has started pricing in the idea that institutions are using the chain as the real demand for AVAX—and then I’ll change my stance.

#AVAX #RWA