What is Avalanche (AVAX)?
Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality, and has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol. Avalanche is blazingly fast, low cost, and green. Any smart contract-enabled application can outperform its competition on Avalanche.
Avalanche launched on mainnet, September 21, 2020. Since then, the platform has grown to secure over 200+ individual projects, $14M+ of AVAX burned (reducing supply), 1,000+ individual block-producing validators, and over 600k+ community members around the globe.
The Avalanche consensus protocol doesn't need a leader to reach consensus like Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), or Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). This factor increases the decentralization of the Avalanche network without sacrificing scalability. In contrast, PoW, PoS, and DPoS end up having one actor process transactions, whose work is then validated by others.
Avalanche uses all nodes to process and validate transactions by implementing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) optimized consensus protocol. DAG allows the network to process transactions in parallel. Validators randomly poll other validators to determine whether a new transaction is valid. After a certain number of this repeated random subsampling, it's statistically proven that it would be almost impossible for a transaction to be false.
All transactions are finalized immediately without other confirmations needed. This means that there are no blocks as seen in traditional blockchains but instead parented transactions known as vertices. Running a validator node and validating transactions have low and accessible hardware requirements, which helps with performance and decentralization.
What is the Avalanche (AVAX) Token?
AVAX is the native token of Avalanche. It is a hard-capped, scarce asset that is used to pay for fees, secure the platform through staking, and provide a basic unit of account between the multiple subnets created on Avalanche.
Who Are the Founders of Avalanche?
Ava Labs has three co-founders, among whom is Emin Gün Sirer, the veteran computer scientist long associated with Bitcoin ( BTC) and decentralized networks.
Sirer has long been concerned with Bitcoin scaling, and the Avalanche Consensus is a direct follow-on from this research, allowing transaction volumes significantly higher than Bitcoin and competing with the likes of Visa.
Like Sirer, fellow co-founders Kevin Sekniqi and Maofan “Ted” Yin are also associated with Cornell University. Sirer is an advisor to Yin, who is undertaking a PhD in computer science.
The remainder of the team is made up of computer science, economics, finance and law experts.
What Makes Avalanche Unique?
Avalanche provides decentralized asset trading which anyone can launch and use, and does so with a network which is unique in the digital realm in providing subsecond transaction confirmations.
Developers aim to bring together the huge, fragmented and often opaque world of asset trading under one roof, allowing barrier-free access. Developers can create and release all manner of entities from blockchains to digital representations of any asset, and allow them to trade according to any given parameters. These include, for example, mimicking compliance regulations in various jurisdictions.
The AVAX token forms the in-house payment method for Avalanche, and is used for fee collection during transactions, as well as for incentives and related purposes. Users can also earn passive income by staking their coins on the network.
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Cryptocurrency