The avalanche token has gained 25% in a week, while other cryptocurrencies have tumbled, thanks to Ava Labs' tie-up with Deloitte

• The avalanche token has gained 25% in a week after Ava Labs secured a deal with "Big Four" accountant Deloitte.
• Deloitte will build more efficient disaster relief platforms using the avalanche blockchain, Ava Labs' boss Emin Gun Sirer said.
• While avalanche has soared, bitcoin has lost 10.5%, shiba inu has shed 19% and ether has fallen 13%.

The cryptocurrency market has had a rough week. Almost $300 billion in total market value was wiped out in a matter of days after investors cashed in on recent record highs. But one coin in particular has bucked that trend.

Avalanche's avax token was up by over 20% in the week to Thursday, compared with losses of around 9% in bitcoin and 11% in direct rival ether, while the cardano and solana networks' tokens fell around 13%, according to CoinMarketcap.

The catalyst for avalanche was developer Ava Labs' partnership with "Big Four" accounting firm Deloitte, which chief executive Emin Gün Sirer unveiled on Wednesday on Twitter. Avax hit an all-time high of around $110 on the Binance exchange on Thursday.

"​​Ava Labs is thrilled to announce its partnership with Deloitte to build more efficient disaster relief platforms using the avalanche blockchain," Emin Gün Sirer, avalanche founder said in a tweet.

Deloitte's government crisis management services will build a disaster recovery platform on the avalanche blockchain, according to a press release by the accounting firm. The "Close as You Go Service" will help simplify applications for reimbursements for victims of natural disasters.

"The new platform gives state and local officials a decentralized, low-cost and fully immutable system that empowers both the grant funders, and the aid recipients, while using the transparency of blockchain to minimize fraud, waste and abuse," Ava Labs' Sirer tweeted.

A big consulting firm stepping into blockchain technology highlights how mainstream the digital world is becoming. Deloitte is one of the world's four largest accounting firms along with ​​PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Ernst & Young, and KPMG.

"This effort combines the speed, resilience and adaptability of Avalanche, and Deloitte's Fortune 100 enterprise knowledge," Sirer tweeted.

Avalanche is one of a number of ethereum-rival blockchains that offer smart-contract capabilities that are a key element to decentralized finance, in that they allow two parties to execute a transaction automatically, with no intermediary, when certain criteria are met.

Its avax token is one of the strongest performing cryptocurrencies so far this year, with a gain of over 3,000%, behind top performer solana token, sol, which is up around 14,000% and compared with a gain of around 100% in bitcoin.