AVAX price shot up to hit an intraday high of $31.32 hours after the Avalanche Treasury Co., which is backed by the Avalanche foundation, announced plans to become a public vehicle dedicated to acquiring up to $1 billion worth of AVAX in its treasury.

Avalanche Treasury Co. will go public through a business combination with Mountain Lake Acquisition Corp, the company said in an Oct. 1 press release. The merger is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2026, following which the company will start trading on Nasdaq under the ticker AVAT.

Following the merger, the new entity is expected to be valued at over $675 million. Of this, approximately $460 million was raised via a funding round, which saw participation from several prominent investors, including Dragonfly, ParaFi Capital, Pantera Capital, VanEck, and Galaxy Digital, among others, along with individual backers such as Ava Labs co-founder Emin Gün Sirer.

The remainder of the value stems from the capital already held by Mountain Lake Acquisition Corp, which had previously been seeded with roughly $230 million ahead of the deal.

Upon launch, the company plans to direct its efforts and allocate its resources to the goal of becoming a strategic “growth engine” for the Avalanche ecosystem, according to CEO Bart Smith.

“We intend to deploy capital to empower the best builders and accelerate the most promising technologies on Avalanche, which we believe creates a powerful cycle of value. As the network thrives through our strategic support, the fundamental value of our own treasury can grow with it,” Smith said.

Smith, who is a Wall Street veteran with over two decades of experience at firms like Susquehanna International Group and AllianceBernstein, will lead AVAT alongside an advisory board made up of some of the most recognizable names in the digital asset space, including Aave founder Stani Kulechov, Blockworks cofounder Jason Yanowitz, and Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi, with Emin Gün Sirer serving as a strategic advisor.

“This team and advisory group have the institutional credibility and crypto-native expertise to execute at scale,” said Paul Grinberg, Chairman & CEO of Mountain Lake Acquisition Corp.

Avalanche Treasury Co. to buy AVAX at a discount

As part of its goal to accumulate more than $1 billion worth of AVAX tokens, which would account for over 8% of AVAX’s circulating supply based on current prices, the company has already begun purchasing AVAX directly from the Avalanche Foundation at a discounted rate.

For its first purchase, the company acquired $200 million worth of AVAX tokens, and this structure delivers an entry point at approximately 0.77 times the net asset value, giving investors a roughly 23% discount relative to current AVAX prices and most passive ETF alternatives.

AVAX price fails to break out

Avalanche (AVAX) price initially reacted to the news and rallied a little over 2% in the hours after the news surfaced, but momentum failed to hold as it failed to decisively flip the resistance around $30-$31 into support.

At press time, it had lost almost all of those gains but was still up over 30% from September lows. A major driver of these gains has been the growing institutional appetite for AVAX as a treasury asset this month.

Besides AVAT, AgriFORCE Growing Systems, a small agricultural tech company turned Bitcoin mining company, has recently announced plans to rebrand as AVAX One and pivot into a digital asset treasury model focused on Avalanche.