The crypto market is warming up again after a long winter. Bitcoin, which hit an all-time high above $126,000 in October 2025, went through a sharp correction alongside global markets and slid into the $60,000s over the summer. Tensions in the Middle East, oil prices and interest rate fears kept risk appetite suppressed for months. In recent weeks, the picture has changed. Easing oil prices, new US regulatory steps on tokenized assets and money flowing back into funds have pushed crypto's flagship back above $85,000. One of the most talked-about names during this recovery has been Avalanche. But this time, price isn't the only reason.
Last week, two pieces of news broke almost at the same time. In Turkey, neither got much attention.
The first came from the Gulf. UAE PASS, the United Arab Emirates' national digital identity system, announced that the "Digital Vault" where official documents are stored will move to Avalanche technology. Citizens, residents and visitors use the system to verify their identity, sign documents and access thousands of public and private services. We are talking about more than 12 million users. Here, blockchain will be used to verify whether a document is genuine and whether it has been altered.
The second came from New York. ICE, the parent company of the NYSE, the world's largest stock exchange, is looking for blockchain infrastructure for a tokenized stock platform that trades 24/7. Michael Blaugrund, who leads strategic initiatives at ICE, said it plainly on stage: among the platforms they've evaluated, Avalanche checks most of their boxes. Ava Labs, for its part, said the exchange has been testing the technology for a year.
A country's identity system. The world's largest stock exchange. Institutions like these measure a technology a hundred times before they trust it.
So what is Avalanche?
Put simply, Avalanche is a blockchain network on which money, assets, documents and applications can run. But there are hundreds of those. Two things set it apart.
The first is how it reaches agreement. On Bitcoin, confirming a transaction takes minutes, because the network decides through a race between miners. Avalanche took a completely different path: computers on the network randomly ask small groups of each other, "what do you think?", and opinions snowball rapidly into a single outcome, like an avalanche. That's where the name comes from. The result: transactions are finalized in under a second. If you're building an exchange or a payment system, that difference is critical.
The second is that every institution can build its own chain. A bank, an exchange or a government agency can use Avalanche technology to launch a separate chain where it sets its own rules and decides who participates. It can write identity checks and regulatory compliance directly into the system. FIFA building its own "FIFA blockchain" for the World Cup, and Indian agricultural firm Arya.ag launching its own network for farm loans, are both products of this model. The Avalanche9000 upgrade at the end of 2024 cut the cost of launching such a chain by 99.9%.
So this isn't about "a coin." It's about infrastructure that institutions build their business on.
And behind this infrastructure is an Istanbul story
Emin Gün Sirer, CEO of Ava Labs, the company that built Avalanche, is a graduate of Robert College in Istanbul. Then came Princeton, the University of Washington, and years as a computer science professor at Cornell. In 2003, five years before Bitcoin, he worked on Karma, one of the first systems to use "proof of work" to create digital money. In 2018, he founded Ava Labs with two of his doctoral students at Cornell.
Think about it: when a citizen in the UAE shares a diploma or a property deed, when an exchange executive in New York weighs trading infrastructure late at night, when a farmer in India tries to borrow against the grain in his warehouse, what runs in the background is the idea of a scientist raised in Istanbul.
So why not in Turkey?
This is the real question, and to me, the least discussed one.
Turkey actually knows this path. In early 2023, the government announced that citizens would be able to log into e-Devlet, Turkey's e-government portal, with a blockchain-based digital ID. The 2026-2028 Medium-Term Program also states that a blockchain-based next-generation digital identity infrastructure will be developed and deployed. And Turkey has a far larger user base than the UAE: e-Devlet is used by 68 million people.
So the intent is there, the plan is there, the users are there. But while the world moves fast, we are still stuck at "will be developed." Gulf countries are moving beyond testing toward deployment. India is turning to blockchain to solve the credit problem of millions of farmers. In Turkey, meanwhile, the word crypto still mostly triggers one question: "how many x will this coin do?"
Let's be honest here: which technology a country trusts with its identity or financial infrastructure is a serious decision. There are legitimate concerns around data sovereignty, security and a preference for domestic software, and no column should make that call. Nobody is telling Turkey to "switch to Avalanche tomorrow." But we have every right to ask: why is a technology that sits at the table of the world's largest exchange, that appears in the Gulf's digital government projects, and whose founder came from this very soil, not even on the table in Turkey? Why is there no joint research program at one of our universities, no pilot at one of our banks, no test network at a single public institution?
What we're really missing
For years, Turkey has been a "user" in the crypto world. We are one of the countries that trade the most crypto globally. But we are largely absent from the side that builds the infrastructure and sets the standards. The paradox is that one of the people setting those standards came out of our own schools.
Emin Gün Sirer's success is, of course, not Turkey's success; he built this in America, with an international team. But his story tells us something: people from this land are capable of designing the world's financial infrastructure. What's missing isn't talent. What's missing is the courage to keep that talent here and to test these technologies here.
The UAE is not treating the move of a 12-million-user system as a risk; it's treating it as building the future. Perhaps it's time we started talking about crypto not only as an investment vehicle, but as a matter of national infrastructure.
Because the train is leaving. And one of the people who laid its tracks came from our own land.
This article is not investment advice.