New Crypto Deep Dive: Avalanche ($AVAX)

Launch Date: Mainnet, September 21, 2020

Market Cap: $14.6B

Avalanche is one of the fastest organically growing ecosystems in blockchain. It now has over 270 projects building on the platform, including top-tier DeFi projects like Tether, SushiSwap, Chainlink, Circle, and The Graph, and over a thousand validator nodes staking tokens.

Avalanche is 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.

The Race to Smart Contracts

In that regard it’s similar to platforms such as Polkadot $DOT and Cosmos $ATOM but with higher throughput, sub second finality, ability to use multiple custom vms and can scale to millions of validators with their revolutionary consensus offering unparalleled decentralisation.

Polkadot vs. COSMOS vs. Avalanche

Avalanche was built with serving financial markets in mind. It has native support for easily creating and trading digital smart assets with complex custom rule sets that define how the asset is handled and traded to ensure regulatory compliance.

Tokenomics

AVAX is a fixed capped supply token like $BTC which creates scarcity and won’t suffer from the continuous dilution through inflation like other staking platforms. Avalanche makes an excellent payment platform with VISA throughput speeds and low latency and cheap fees.

Transaction fees across all the blockchains in the Primary network, fees for creating and minting of assets, creation of blockchains and the creation of subnets are all paid in AVAX which are burned, reducing total supply.

AVAX is one of very few projects where enterprise use still provides utility for the token. All validators of any subnet have to validate the primary network and stake a minimum of 2000 AVAX. In addition, subnet and blockchain creation fees are paid in AVAX which are burned.

Polkadot in comparison has 10% yearly inflation, in 2050 the supply of DOT will have increased from 1 billion to 16 Billion.

Staking offers rates of between 9.32% and 11.1%. Staking $AVAX is like mining $BTC in the early years. There will only ever be a max of 720 million AVAX.

There are currently 786 and growing block producing validators, importantly the vast majority participating in consensus validating a transaction I run a validator where my $AVAX is locked up for a year.

SPEED

Speed is more than just tps, equally important is latency:

Bitcoin has finality of 60 mins

Ethereum 2.0 is 6 mins

Polkadot is 60 seconds (60 mins to external chains).

Avalanche its sub 1 second

The Avalanche ecosystem is rapidly expanding with Private Securities, ILOs, DEX’s, Synthetics, Stablecoins, Prediction Markets, and more, and all just 4 months since the launch of mainnet.

Messari News Link

LEAD TEAM

Looks like most of the lead engineers of this protocol are CS Professors/Students of Cornell University. So they have credentials and reputation to uphold.

Emin Gün Sirer (CEO/Founder)

A Turkish-American computer scientist. He is currently an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, co-director of IC3. He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems and computer networking.

Kevin Seqniqi (COO/Co-founder)

Kevin Sekniqi is Co-founder of AVA Labs, among others. CS PhD. Cornell.

Kevin is a researcher in various aspects of distributed systems, but most predominantly in blockchains. His distant background is in security and cryptography, including encrypted databases and (fully) homomorphic encryption.

Chris Lavery (CFO/Money Man)

He is a finance and operations high-growth company builder. He helps early-stage venture-backed companies scale.

With nearly 20 years of experience in leadership roles within high-growth, technology-driven corporate environments, Chris has a proven track record of successfully navigating through times of rapid change and growth. He provides advice in a wide swath of critical corporate areas, including strategic planning, financial modeling, FP&A, business intelligence, business plan development and financing, fundraising, M&A, Cap table management and planning, accounting support and controls, revitalizing organizations, supporting product innovation, structuring vital partnerships and alliances, legal, and regulatory affairs.

Why is AVAX $14B and MATIC is only around $10B and they launched their mainnet on Feb 13, 2021, 7 months earlier than AVAX. Perhaps it’s the team, the CFO and the tech is better. You decide. And as always. DYOR. They saw some big pumps recently so wait for the hype to cool down if you want to hold some.