What is Avalanche?
Avalanche is one of the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality. With over 450 projects currently running on Avalanche, it is a powerful alternative layer-1 platform.
Getting Started with Avalanche
Avalanche is one of the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality. Avalanche is blazingly fast, low cost, and eco-friendly. Any smart contract-enabled application can outperform its competition by deploying on Avalanche.
Avalanche launched on mainnet, September 21, 2020. Since then, the platform has grown to secure over 450+ individual projects, $118M+ of AVAX burned (reducing supply), 1,350+ individual block-producing validators, and over 1.5M+ community members around the globe.
Don’t believe it? Checkout Avalanche dApps yourself, and your bound to be impressed.
Who Are the Founders of Avalanche?
Avalanche was founded by Emin Gün Sirer, a professor of computer science and software engineer, assisted by doctoral students Maofan "Ted" Yin and Kevin Sekniqi.
Avalanche started off as a protocol for solving consensus in a network of unreliable machines, where failures may be crash-fault or Byzantine. The protocol's fundamentals were first shared on InterPlanetary File System (aka IPFS) in May 2018 by a pseudonymous group of enthusiasts going by the name "Team Rocket”. It was later developed by a dedicated team of researchers from the Cornell University.
Following the research stage, a startup technology company was founded to develop a blockchain network that would meet complex finance industry requirements. As several sources indicate, "the project was in the realm of academic circles interested in exploring consensus protocols that serve the same purpose of proof-of-work — securing transactions — but are more energy-efficient and have the potential to provide a basis for democratic development and the inclusion of more users in the consensus process".
In March 2020, the AVA codebase (Developer Accelerator Program or AVA DAP) for the Avalanche consensus protocol became open-source and available to public.
What Makes Avalanche Unique?
The Avalanche blockchain is broken down into three primary chains for the varying use cases across the platform.
Exchange Chain (X-Chain)
The Exchange Chain (X-Chain) is the blockchain responsible for creating and transacting Avalanche assets. Avalanche’s native token AVAX is the current most popular cryptocurrency on the platform, but decentralized exchange tokens JOE and PNG aren’t far behind.
Transactions on the X-Chain generate fees paid in AVAX. That’s similar to how gas fees on Ethereum are paid in ETH. So, even if you’re transacting JOE tokens, fees are always settled in AVAX.
Contract Chain (C-Chain)
Smart contracts are Avalanche’s key feature. This feature enables developers to build decentralized applications on Avalanche while leveraging the platform’s security and scalability benefits.
The C-Chain runs smart contracts for the Avalanche platform and is EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible. Being EVM compatible means anyone can deploy Ethereum smart contracts on Avalanche. Why is that a big deal? Because existing Ethereum apps, such as DeFi titans Aave, can easily deploy a version of their product on Avalanche.
Deploying Ethereum smart contracts on Avalanche gives developers access to the latter’s features using the same Ethereum developer tools as always.
Platform Chain (P-Chain)
Avalanche’s P-Chain allows anyone to create an L1 or L2 blockchain. You can even go as far as creating a group of them. In Avalanche terms, these blockchains are called subnets, with the P-Chain being the default subnet common to all. The P-Chain manages the landscape of Avalanche subnets by keeping track of validators, but subnets are also responsible for validating the P-Chain.
