Avalanche News Today: HalfMoon DEX Live and AI Payment Network Expands

Avalanche News Today: AI Payments Collective and HalfMoon DEX Launch Avalanche had a busy 24 hours — a new derivatives DEX went live, an AI-agent startup joined its payments network, and AVAX made a notable price move. Each of these touches a different part of the ecosystem, from trading to enterprise finance. Here's what happened, piece by piece. AVAX Price Update AVAX crypto price is trading at $6.69, up 4.77% over the last 24 hours. Zooming out, AVAX has had a rough stretch — it traded above $10 in early June before dropping sharply to around $6.00 by late June. The current bounce puts it back near $6.70, still well below its recent highs. Market cap sits at $2.88 billion, with a circulating supply of 431.77 million AVAX out of a 715.74 million max supply. Source: CoinMarketCap HalfMoon DEX Launches on Avalanche Orderbook-based DEX HalfMoon launched on Avalanche this week, pitching itself as a CEX-level trading platform built on-chain. Its three main features are perpetuals trading with up to 100x leverage and one-click execution, a "shielded spot" mode designed to hide trading strategies from other market participants, and a fully on-chain, transparent orderbook. HalfMoon is positioning itself as infrastructure for advanced DeFi traders who want speed without giving up transparency. Source: Official Post Avalanche Payments Collective Adds an AI-Agent Partner The Avalanche Payments Collective, a group of 28 organizations including Paxos, Franklin Templeton, Ethena, Anchorage Digital, and Tassat, added its first AI-agent-focused member this week: GoKiteAI, backed by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst. Ava Labs' Tokenization Lead, Olivia Vande Woude, described the Collective as running live production volume rather than isolated pilots — pointing to Axiom's $1.4 billion in cross-border payments processed on Avalanche and Tassat's Link settling institutional transactions in seconds across 30 participants. Combined, the group's rails reportedly reach 150+ countries and 96 currencies. GoKiteAI's contribution is its Kite Agent Passport, which gives AI agents a verifiable identity, user-set spending limits, and a kill switch controlled by a human — letting agents transact on Avalanche's payment rails without ever handling user credentials directly. Source: Official X ORO's Fluency Campaign for DeFi Learners Separately, ORO, an AI assistant built for navigating Avalanche DeFi through natural language, is running a "Fluency" campaign. Users complete interactive lessons on Avalanche DeFi concepts and actions like swaps, staking, and lending to earn ORE Points, with extra rewards for eligible participants before the campaign closes. Source: X What to Watch Next Whether GoKiteAI's agent rails generate real transaction volume beyond the announcement. HalfMoon's early trading volume and whether it pulls liquidity from existing Avalanche DEXs. AVAX price behavior if it retests the June range near $9–10, or slips back toward its $6.00 low.