Avalanche (AVAX) price is up, but do fundamentals support the rally?

cointelegraph.com:

Avalanche (AVAX) witnessed a meteoric start to 2023, gaining 98% in 30 days, and traders are now curious about whether the rally will extend throughout February. AVAX’s year-to-date gains for 2023 have outpaced those of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

Recent reasons for AVAX’s rally can be attributed to an Amazon partnership announcement on Jan. 11. The partnership is meant to easily deploy nodes on the Avalanche blockchain with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Ava Labs, which supports the Avalanche ecosystem, hopes the partnership increases blockchain usage for enterprises and governments.

While AVAX price has benefited from the news, some analysts predict that the move could have been a bull trap.

Let’s dig into the fundamentals to see if on-chain network activity supports the recent AVAX rally.

After the AWS news, AVAX price was not the only metric seeing a quick rise. On Jan. 14, Avalanche network hit a year-to-date high of $31,218 AVAX fees received. The increase in fees compared to the previous 30 days is 59%, signaling that positive price appreciation helped boost the fees that the network received.

While the Avalanche fee base is increasing, it still lags behind top EVM-compatible blockchains like Ethereum, Binance Chain (BNB), Optimism (OP) and Polygon (MATIC). Over the past 30 days, the fees Avalanche has generated rank 9th out of all blockchains.

Notably, layer-2 competitor Polygon earned close to four times the amount of fees compared to Avalanche. Even with the astounding growth thaAvalanche has experienced in 2023, the network will need to substantially increase fees to overtake more blockchains.

A sign of blockchain health is the number of active addresses, users and transactions. Despite reaching a year-to-date