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![]() Icon of Avalanche | |
Denominations | |
---|---|
Code | AVAX |
Development | |
Original author(s) | Emin Gün Sirer, Kevin Sekniqi, Maofan “Ted” Yin |
White paper | https://www.avalabs.org/whitepapers |
Initial release | 23 September 2020 |
Code repository | https://github.com/ava-labs/ |
Development status | Active |
Written in | Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Vue |
Developer(s) | Ava Labs |
Source model | Open source |
Ledger | |
Block explorer | https://explorer.avax.network/ |
Website | |
Website | https://avax.network/ |
Avalanche is a decentralized, open-source proof of stake blockchain with smart contract functionality. AVAX is the native cryptocurrency of the platform.
Avalanche began as a protocol for solving for consensus in a network of unreliable machines, where failures may be crash-fault or Byzantine. [1] The protocol's fundamentals were first shared on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) in May 2018 by a pseudonymous group of enthusiasts going by the name "Team Rocket". [2]
Avalanche was later developed by researchers from Cornell University led by Emin Gün Sirer and doctoral students Maofan "Ted" Yin and Kevin Sekniqi. [3] Following the research stage, a startup technology company was founded to develop a blockchain network that would meet finance industry requirements. [4] [5] [3] In March, 2020, the AVA codebase (Developer Accelerator Program or AVA DAP) for the Avalanche consensus protocol was released as open-source and became available to the public. [6]
In September 2021, the Ava labs foundation received a $230 million investment from a group consisting of Polychain and Three Arrows Capital, through the purchase of the AVAX cryptocurrency. [7]
In November 2021, following an agreement with Deloitte to improve U.S. disaster-relief funding, the Avalanche blockchain moved into the top 10 cryptocurrencies in terms of capitalization. [8]
In August 2022, whistleblower "Crypto Leaks" published a report accusing Ava Labs of secret deals with a law firm aimed at legally destabilizing Avalanche's competitors. Ava Labs CEO Emin Gün Sirer denied any illegal or unethical deal with Roche Freedmen law firm. [9]
In January 2023, a partnership was announced between Avalanche and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve Avalanche's infrastructure and decentralized application ecosystem. [10] Arkham Intelligence also announced a partnership with Avalanche, allowing Arkham users to analyze the activities of wallets and entities within the Avalanche ecosystem. [11]
In September, 2020, the company issued on X-Chain its native token Avax. [12] [13]
The protocol has four basic interrelated mechanisms that compose structural support of the consensus tool. These four mechanisms are Slush, Snowflake, Snowball, and Avalanche. By using randomized sampling and metastability to ascertain and persist transactions, it represents a new protocol family. Although the original paper focused on a single protocol, namely Avalanche, it implicitly introduced a broad spectrum of voting-based, or quorum-based consensus protocols, called the Snow family. [2] While Avalanche is a single instantiation, the Snow family seems to be able to generalize all quorum-based voting protocols for replica control. Unlike prior quorum-based work, the Snow family enables arbitrarily parametrizable failure probability at the quorum intersection level. Standard quorum-based protocols define this failure probability to be precisely zero, but by introducing errors in the quorum intersection, a larger set of consensus protocol designs is available. [14]
Consensus protocols are the basis for the state machine replication problem, which aims to enable a set of machines to achieve agreement over a network even when a subset of the machines are corrupted. There are two major families of consensus protocols to date - classical consensus and Nakamoto consensus protocols. [15] The first achieves consensus through quorums, thus requiring voting. Famous instantiations of this are Paxos (in the crash-fault-tolerant environment) and PBFT [16] in the Byzantine-fault tolerant case. These protocols achieve agreement in a similar operation to a parliament: a proposal (transaction) is proposed and voted on to be accepted or rejected. If sufficient votes cast by the various replicas are accumulated (typically collected through elected leader replica), then a quorum is achieved, and thus agreement.
The second family, pioneered by Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin is that of the Nakamoto consensus. Unlike quorum-based protocols, machines operating an instance of Nakamoto consensus achieve agreement on transactions by downloading the longest chain (typically called a fork). In Bitcoin, the longest chain is verified by ensuring that it is the one with the highest degree of work (or proof of work). Snow, while quorum-based, seems to be a universal generalization of all quorum-based protocols. Unlike prior work which requires that quorums be deterministic, i.e. the failure probability is precisely zero, Avalanche loosens this requirement, thus enabling quorum-based protocols to estimate global network state with errors. [14]
While the Snow family can be theoretically generalized to all classes of assumptions that quorum-based protocols have previously made, the formalization paper analyzes Avalanche under an asynchronous network in the Byzantine setting. [17] [16] [18] The assumptions are as follows:
Processors
Network
The Avalanche consensus algorithm is a sophisticated approach to achieving consensus in various blockchain networks. It utilizes a randomized voting system to quickly confirm transactions, achieve high throughput, and reduce the risk of splits. This approach also allows for the creation of subnets, which can operate independently with their own validators and parameters. [19]
The consensus mechanism also involves a set of sub-protocols, including Avalanche-X, Avalanche-C, and Avalanche-P, to achieve fast, secure, and decentralized transactions on its network. Avalanche consensus can confirm transactions in less than a second and scale to thousands of transactions per second (TPS), making it one of the fastest and most scalable consensus mechanisms in the blockchain industry. [19]
The Snow family generalizes the typical definitions of safety and liveness encountered in quorum-based protocols. For Avalanche specifically, these properties are:
Avalanche, like other asynchronous networks, is not guaranteed to terminate and thus does not have the liveness property, during asynchrony. Like Paxos, Avalanche's goal is to ensure fault tolerance and it guarantees safety under asynchrony, but not liveness. This is in contrast to Nakamoto consensus, which guarantees liveness, and not safety under asynchrony. [16]
A Byzantine fault is a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine generals problem", developed to describe a situation in which, to avoid catastrophic failure of the system, the system's actors must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of these actors are unreliable.
A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires coordinating processes to reach consensus, or agree on some data value that is needed during computation. Example applications of consensus include agreeing on what transactions to commit to a database in which order, state machine replication, and atomic broadcasts. Real-world applications often requiring consensus include cloud computing, clock synchronization, PageRank, opinion formation, smart power grids, state estimation, control of UAVs, load balancing, blockchain, and others.
Paxos is a family of protocols for solving consensus in a network of unreliable or fallible processors. Consensus is the process of agreeing on one result among a group of participants. This problem becomes difficult when the participants or their communications may experience failures.
Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. This is done to avoid the computational cost of proof-of-work (POW) schemes. The first functioning use of PoS for cryptocurrency was Peercoin in 2012, although the scheme, on the surface, still resembled a POW.
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Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist. Sirer developed the Avalanche Consensus protocol underlying the Avalanche blockchain platform, and is currently the CEO and co-founder of Ava Labs. He was an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, and is the former co-director of The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts (IC3). He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems and computer networking.
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