Avalanche Review: The Fastest Transaction Finality Platform

People think that blockchains will be sluggish and non-scalable over time. The Avalanche consensus uses a revolutionary approach to the consensus to deliver strong safety guarantees, speedy finality, and high throughput without compromising decentralisation. The Avalanche Consensus Protocol is the consensus mechanism used by Avalanche.

Overview of Avalanche Platform

Exchange Chain (X-Chain), Platform Chain (P-Chain), and Contract Chain (C-Chain) are the three built-in blockchains of Avalanche. The Primary Network validates and secures all three blockchains. All members of all custom subnets must also be members of the Primary Network by staking at least 2,000 AVAX.

Exchange Chain (X-Chain)

X-Chain uses Avalanche Consensus Mechanism. X-Chain is a UTXO-based chain structured as a directed acyclic graph. The default asset chain for Avalanche's native AVAX token allows new assets, including utility tokens, NFTs, and smart contract platforms, to be created and traded. The X-Chain is an instance of the Avalanche Virtual Machine (AVM).  

Contract Chain (C-Chain) 

The C-Chain is the principal chain that Avalanche users connect with for DeFi and NFT activities, and it hosts smart contracts. It is a linear chain that uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), with the same tooling that most Ethereum developers are used to, but with the extra benefits of speed and low costs thanks to Avalanche's Snowman Consensus implementation.

Platform Chain (P-Chain) 

Staking, governance, and validator coordination are all done using the P-Chain. Validators stake AVAX token on the Platform Chain. It allows for custom subnets and stores network metadata such as the active subnets and each subnet's node list. The P-Chain and C-Chain are linear chain that implements the Snowman Consensus to correctly add/remove nodes from the validator set at a given time.

Subnets 

A subnet, also known as a subnetwork, is a dynamic group of validators who collaborate to reach a consensus on the state of a group of blockchains. Each blockchain is only validated by only one subnet. A subnet can validate many blockchains, and a node can belong to many subnets.

A subnet administers its members, and its constituent validators may be required to meet particular criteria.

Features of Subnets that can be used:

Compliance

Regulatory compliance is easy to handle with Avalanche's subnet architecture. As previously stated, validators may be required to meet a set of standards by a subnet.

The following are some examples of requirements:

Support for Private Blockchains

You can construct a subnet that only specific pre-defined validators can join, as well as a private subnet where only those validators can see the contents of the blockchains. Businesses can use these subnets who want to keep their information confidential.

Separation of Purposes

Some validators will refuse to validate specific blockchains in a heterogeneous network of blockchains because they have no interest in them. The subnet architecture allows validators to focus on the blockchains that are important to them. Validators will have less work to do as a result of this. 

Specific Requirements for Each Application

Validators may be required to have specific properties by various blockchain-based applications. Assume you have a programme that demands a lot of RAM or processing power. Validators may be required to meet particular hardware requirements by a Subnet to ensure that the application does not suffer from slow validators.

How does Avalanche Consensus Work?

Repeated sub-sampled voting is used in the Avalanche Consensus. When a validator decides whether to accept or reject a transaction, it asks a small, random subset of validators whether they believe the transaction should be approved or refused. If the queried validator thinks the transaction is invalid, has already rejected it, or prefers a different transaction, it will respond that it should be refused. Otherwise, it says it believes the transaction should be approved.

The validator prefers to accept the transaction if a sufficiently large share of the validator's sampled response that it should be taken. 

If the transaction is questioned again in the future, it will respond that it believes the transaction should be accepted. Similarly, if a sufficiently significant number of validators respond that the transaction should be refused, the validator will choose to reject the transaction.

The validator repeats the sampling process until the majority of the validators polled respond in the same way (accept or refuse) for some rounds in a row. When there are no issues in a transaction, it is usually completed fast. When there are disputes, honest validators quickly cluster around them, creating a positive feedback loop that continues until all accurate validators prefer that transaction. As a result, non-conflicting transactions are accepted, and conflicting transactions are rejected. 

If any honest validator approves or rejects a transaction, all honest validators will accept or reject that transaction (with a high likelihood based on system parameters).

Snowman Consensus Protocol

The Snowman consensus system is based on the Avalanche consensus mechanism. However, transactions are ordered linearly. When dealing with smart contracts, this property comes in handy. The Snowman, unlike the Avalanche consensus protocol, makes blocks. The Avalanche consensus protocol powers Snowman. Both P-Chain and C-Chain implement the Snowman consensus protocol. 

Main Features of Avalanche 

Speed

It employs a unique consensus process devised by a group of Cornell computer scientists. Transactions get confirmed in less than one second.

Scalability

It outperforms many existing blockchains, with 4,500 transactions per second.

Security 

It ensures more security guarantees than the 51% criterion used by other blockchains.

Flexibility

Create custom blockchains and decentralized apps with nearly any logic in a matter of minutes.

Sustainability

Instead of proof-of-work, it uses a more energy-efficient proof-of-stake consensus algorithm.

Smart Contract Support 

Allows you to create Solidity smart contracts and use your Ethereum tools like Remix, Metamask, Truffle, etc.

Private and Public Blockchains 

Create your blockchains, either public or private.

Designed for the Financial Sector

Digital smart assets can be easily created and traded with complex, custom rules.

Tokenomics

The Avalanche network's native token is AVAX, although developers can create their tokens on its custom blockchains. Like on the Ethereum network, fees on the  Avalanche are burned, gradually depleting the token supply.

Avalanche is a proof-of-stake platform that relies on validators to receive block rewards by staking AVAX. Validators can earn up to 11 percent annual percentage yield (APY) on staked AVAX, with an average annual return of roughly 9.75 percent. 

AVAX allows stakeholders of the network to:

AVAX tokens are now in the supply of more than 245 million, with a maximum capped supply of 720 million. Three hundred sixty million AVAX tokens were minted in the genesis block, with the remaining 360 million tokens will be created over time. Unlike Bitcoin, whose fees go to miners, Avalanche fees are burnt, increasing the token supply scarcity. 

Token Distribution of AVAX

Avalanche Foundation Incentives Program

Avalanche Foundation Announced $180M DeFi Incentive Program Titled ‘Avalanche Rush’. On 18 August 2021. The program's aim was to encourage more applications and tokens to move to Avalanche’s decentralized finance (DeFi) platform. 

The program was a success, as after the announcement on18 august, the daily active address count was 4991 at that time, now after more than 6 months, the daily active address on  22 February stands at 99,601. So it is evident from the data that users have started using Avalanche Network.

In November, the Avalanche Foundation launched Blizzard, a 200 Million Dollars fund to support ecosystem development, which already saw over 320 projects building on the platform.

Analysis of Avalanche Platform

Source: stats.avax.network

On February 24, the daily transaction count on C- chain was 1,040,725, while at the start of January 1 2021, the daily transaction count was 1851. 

Source: stats.avax.network

From Avalanche’s Mainnet launch to up till now, a total of 101,971,171 transactions have been executed on Avalanche C-chain. More than 100 million transactions executed shows that People have actively used Avalanche.

Source: stats.avax.network

On February 24, daily active addresses were 84,986, while Daily active addresses on Ethereum on the same day were  513,537. Daily active addresses on Avalanche is still way below Ethereum’s active address, but since Avalanche is also newer in comparison to ethereum, the growth of daily active addresses on Avalanche is impressive.

Source: stats.avax.network

All the transaction fees of the Avalanche network is burned, thus reducing the supply of AVAX token. Around 910,0756 AVAX tokens have been burned since the Avalanche mainnet launch on September 20 2020. According to the current AVAX token price of 75 dollars each, 682,556,700 million dollars worth of AVAX tokens have been burned.

Source: stats.avax.network

Around 134,445 smart contracts have been deployed on the C-chain of Avalanche; thus, it shows that developers are actively working and deploying smart contracts for various applications.

Conclusion

The Avalanche platform and AVAX token have performed really well in the past year. The Avalanche platform saw a large increase in user count, developer count, smart contracts deployed, and transactions. AVAX token price increased by more than 3000% in the year 2021 and made an all-time high of 147 $ on 21 November 2021.

Avalanche aims to digitize all assets on the planet, connect them into its network, and act as a new interoperable finance core platform.