What's Driving Token Prices? January 28, 2026

AVAX (-3.8%) - On Monday, the first ETF for the Avalanche Layer-1 blockchain launched. The ETF, sponsored by VanEck, will also give investors exposure to staking rewards alongside spot price appreciation of the AVAX token. Launched in 2020, Avalanche is an EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain that as of late has focused on hosting tokenized assets and bridging the gap between traditional finance and the on-chain economy.
AXS (+1.5%) - Last week, AXS, the token in the Axie Infinity gaming ecosystem, shot up after news that it had revamped its tokenomics. At the beginning of 2026, Sky Mavis, the developer of Axie Infinity, announced it would halt the issuance of Smooth Love Potion (SLP) in one area of its game. Additionally, the team introduced bonded AXS (bAXS), so any AXS earned within the game is non-transferable. Both of these changes are aimed at curbing the “farm and dump” behavior pattern as SLP and AXS are earned in-game. Axie Infinity, at its peak in 2021, had over 2.7M daily active users and saw its AXS token soar to $157. Since then, the game has lost much of its initial appeal as farming bots have overrun the product, and game updates have been slower to ship than expected. The new tokenomics changes mark an aggressive shift in the project’s direction as the team attempts to right the ship.
RIVER (+12%) - Last week, a little-known DeFi project, River, received an investment from Tron founder Justin Sun, which caused the token's price to double overnight. River, which builds cross-chain stablecoin infrastructure, announced last week that Sun had invested $8M in the project to bring its deployments to the Tron blockchain, its associated DeFi products, and stablecoins. Maelstrom Capital (Arthur Hayes’s firm) and Spartan Group also invested in River, and the project spent the past week on a partnership blitz with listings on major exchanges such as Binance, OKX, and HTX (formerly Huobi). Some have voiced concern about the project’s meteoric rise. According to data from CoinGlass, open interest on RIVER was over 80 times its spot volume, indicating that the perpetual futures market is influencing the spot price of RIVER, not organic spot buying. The token is up +11.9% in the last week but up 810% in the past month.

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