Avalanche is launching its fully-featured mainnet, a highly-scalable, open-source platform for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one, interoperable ecosystem, next Monday, September 21.
Avalanche is the first smart contracts platform that confirms transactions in under one second, supports the entirety of the Ethereum virtual machine (VM) and development toolkit, and enables up to millions of independent validators to participate as full, block-producing nodes (Avalanche featured over 1,000 nodes operated by community members on its Denali testnet).
The Avalanche (AVAX) token is the native token of the Avalanche platform and is primarily used to secure the network through staking, pay for operational fees, transfer value peer-to-peer, and create new networks on the Avalanche platform.
“Monday will mark the beginning of a new era for cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and decentralized applications,” says Emin Gün Sirer, Co-Founder and CEO of Ava Labs. “Avalanche is the first major breakthrough in our space since Satoshi’s leap forward, and we intend to follow in their footsteps to have the same, defining impact as we stand on the cusp of a new decade.”
In addition to supporting transaction finality under one second, Avalanche is capable of throughput orders of magnitude greater than existing blockchain networks (4,500+ transactions/second on low hardware), and security thresholds well-above the 51% standards of other networks.
“Avalanche moves at the rapid pace of crypto markets and will offer the first compelling alternative to existing networks that either rely on centralization to perform or haven’t shown they can scale to market demand without incurring massive fees,” says Kevin Sekniqi of Ava Labs. “We’re excited to be launching with an outstanding community around us, and look forward to fueling DeFi’s next boom.”
At the beginning of September, DeFi applications on Ethereum peaked at $9.6B in total value locked, more than doubling the market’s size in under a month, according to DeFi Pulse. This incredible growth has validated the real interest in decentralized technologies, specifically within finance. Ethereum gas fees peaked at an average of $15 per transaction and the network was congested limiting participation to high-net-worth individuals and larger organizations.
Avalanche can help Ethereum-based applications achieve high-performance, security, and scalability without much change to their current workflow. The Avalanche Contract Chain (C-Chain) is an implementation of the Ethereum VM, meaning Solidity works out of the box to make porting over applications seamless. The Avalanche ecosystem is continually growing and welcomes all decentralized applications looking for a blockchain solution to unleash their true potential and build without limits.
“DeFi is emerging as an asset class with massive growth potential for individuals and institutions alike,” says John Wu, President of Ava Labs. “Avalanche can, and I believe will, be the network that brings that potential to reality by connecting these worlds together and creating a new market structure defined by velocity, efficiency, and innovation in new products and services available to people around the world.”
The launch comes just 16 months after Ava Labs, the team behind the project, exited stealth mode. In that time, it has completed and publicly launched three test networks, attracted contributions from a large pool of open-source developers, awarded significant grants for engineers to build infrastructure and applications through its accelerator, and integrated with leading projects like Chainlink, Polyient, and Quantstamp.
It has raised $60M to-date, including $42M in a 4.5 hour public sale this July, and a private sale led by Galaxy Digital, Bitmain, and Initialized Capital.
