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BackGet Familiar with Avalanche – the Fastest Smart Contracts Platform in the Blockchain Industry
Building better blockchains is no easy job. But Avalanche (AVAX) network is pushing the envelope with its open, programmable smart contracts platform for decentralized applications. The network is now the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality. And it has become impossible to ignore! We are happy to list their token AVAX and offer you access to an asset and network posing serious competition to all major blockchains in the space.
A Major Blockchain Player
In May 2018, a paper titled “Snowflake to Avalanche” was released, showing that a combination of the classical consensus protocols and Nakamoto consensus could work together. Later that year, Avalanche was founded by Emin Gün Sirer, Kevin Sekniqi and Maofan Yin.
One of Avalanche’s advantages is the ability for Ethereum-based applications to easily switch to the Avalanche network, utilizing the lower transaction fees and faster throughput speeds.
Soon after inception, Avalanche raised around $60 million across various ICOs and hundreds of millions more from various VCs. In April 2020 the first version of Avalanche’s testnet was launched and in September that year the mainnet launched.
New trading pairs: AVAX/USD & AVAX/EUR
How Avalanche Platform Works
The Avalanche Platform uses three instantiations of consensus protocols referred to as Snow: Avalanche, Snowman and Frosty. They combine the properties of the classical consensus protocols (Proof of Stake) and the Nakamoto consensus (Proof of Work). This allows for low latency, high throughput and efficient scaling opportunities. One of the advantages is that it is not prone to 51% attacks, instead a minimum of 80% of nodes are needed for an attack to be successful.
In order to reach consensus, the polling mechanism is used, which is similar to the gossip protocol, a communication protocol for multicasting messages. Network participants are involved to find out what the ecosystem wants. Nodes ‘gossip’ with other validators about the validity of the transactions that are being proposed on the network. Other nodes are “polled” to increase the probability that they submit valid transactions.
Furthermore, the platform consists of three main components: P-Chain, C-Chain and X-Chain. The P-Chain and C-Chain work as ‘regular’ blockchains whereas the X-Chain is known as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), which differs from regular blockchains as transactions are not organized chronologically, but it links transactions in parallel with other transactions so that they don’t have to be bundled in a block first and it does not slow down the network.
- Platform (P-Chain): AVAX tokens can be locked and staked here and validators are coordinated to keep track of subnets – using Snowman’s consensus protocol.
- Exchange Chain (X-Chain): a decentralized platform that enables the creation of new assets, the exchange of assets, and transfer between subnets as well as being an instance of the Avalanche Virtual Machine (AVM). The X-Chain allows for the creation or minting of digital assets like stablecoins, utility tokens, NFTs, equities and more. The fees are paid in Avalanche’s native utility token AVAX
- Contract Chain (C-Chain): an implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that allows developers to move over Ethereum applications such as MetaMask or Web3.js. Ethereum applications can pivot to Avalanche using the C-Chain, where the gas fees are lower and throughput is faster – using Snowman’s consensus protocol.
Note: We support transactions on C-Chain only at Coinmetro.
Why Is Avalanche Network Better?
According to Avalanche, deploying smart contracts on Avalanche costs just a tenth of what they cost on Ethereum. High gas fees, front-running, and other adverse effects of slow smart contract blockchains are now a thing of the past. Many more features make AVAX a sought after platform these days:
- Scalability: the consensus engine is designed to support hundreds of millions of devices without compromising speed and transaction throughput.
- Security: due to its design of the Snowflake protocol, it can withstand high numbers of attackers.
- Decentralization: no centralized control of any kind and no distinction between miners, developers and users.
- Governance: anyone can connect to the network and participate in governance.
- Interoperability: the Avalanche platform is designed for many blockchains to be built on top of it. Existing platforms can easily port to it, import balances, support multiple scripting languages and virtual machines and support multiple deployment scenarios.
Underneath the Hood – Avalanche Subnetworks
The Avalanche Platform consists of subnets (subnetworks), a dynamic set of validators to come to a consensus on the state of different blockchain networks. Each subnet can have its own consensus mechanism, with its own incentive scheme for validators.
Developers can create Virtual Machines with their own validator rule sets and make use of any VMs they wish.
Subnets can also be permissioned and limited to a certain number of validators. Validators can decide which subnet they want to join and this can reduce transaction bloats. In other blockchain projects, every validator needs to approve every validator on the network. Only the Default Subnet is a subnet of which all validators need to be part of.
AVAX – Are You Holding?
AVAX is Avalanche’s native utility token and it is used to secure the network through staking, pay for transaction fees on the network, transact in a peer-to-peer fashion and provide a basic unit of account between the subnets of the platform. Furthermore, all transaction fees are burned. It has a supply cap of 720 million tokens, of which 360 million were released at genesis.
Half of the total supply is allocated to pay validators in staking rewards and they are scheduled to be released in the next decades.
To become a validator node, a minimum of 2000 AVAX must be staked, with a minimum lock-up period of 14 days.
One can also become a delegator by staking a minimum of 25 AVAX, with a minimum lock-up period of 14 days as well. Validators are being rewarded with staking rewards.
Staked assets do not serve as collateral, unlike other platforms like Ethereum, which gives the advantage that the staked tokens cannot be lost by validators.
DApps on Avalanche
Avalaunch is a launchpad built for the Avalanche Platform where developers can launch their projects. Registration and KYC is needed in order to participate in the project launches. Lydia Finance is another launchpad on which Avalanche projects can be built. It works differently from Avalaunch or other launchpads as it offers IFO’s (Initial Farm Offerings).
Some of the applications already built on Avalanche making the blockchain space better are: The Graph, Copper, TrustToken and many more.
THT on MARs
Furthermore, in addition to this new listing, we are taking the opportunity to share more exciting news. As you may already know, we launched our MARs Program earlier this year to great acclaim. By staking your XCM on our platform, MARs (Multi-Asset Rewards) gives you incremental rewards paid out in specific tokens included as part of the program.
KDA was the first asset added to MARs and later on we introduced FLUX.
We are excited to announce that we have now added THT to the MARs Program! In addition to KDA and FLUX, you will also receive THT rewards when you stake your XCM. The rewards are being paid with effect from 6 July, but will all be visible and back paid later next week.
We are carrying on with our effort to provide you with groundbreaking staking plans and financial services.
To include AVAX in your portfolio, take action now and sign up to our platform in just a few steps! Get connected and find out more about new listings and staking plans. Join the ever-growing Coinmetro community on Discord and Telegram to stay up to date with the latest crypto developments, learn and exchange ideas with like-minded people.