Avalanche is the fastest smart contract platform in the blockchain industry in terms of completion time, with low cost and environmentally friendly gas. Avalanche launched on The main network on September 21, 2020, and has over 200 projects online, over $14 million in AVAX destruction (reduced supply), over 1,000 individual block production verifiers, and over 600,000 community members. It is the leader of many new public chains.

Avalanche's biggest feature compared to other public chains is its consensus mechanism. Led by Cornell University professor Emin Gun Sirer, Avalanche designed a new consensus mechanism based on random sampling and metastable decision making, which combined the advantages of the "classical Byzantine consensus protocol" that relied on communication transmission and the "Satoshi Consensus protocol" that relied on proof of work to create a chain structure. At the same time, it solves the problems of weak scalability and robustness of classical Byzantine consensus and high delay, low throughput and excessive resource consumption of Nakamoto Consensus.

The advantage of this consensus mechanism can be seen in Avalanche's unique transaction confirmation method. When a transaction is broadcast to Avalanche, if the transaction is valid, the verifier undergoes a "repeat random sampling" process, in which a random number of nodes are selected from the system verifier to participate in block verification. If most nodes have the same description of the event, it is judged to be true. If most nodes give different answers, the event content is switched and the sampling is repeated until the end.

Based on this consensus mode, Avalanche can support thousands of nodes to participate in transaction verification at the same time, without giving up network performance (collective verification of the entire network), and without giving up the degree of decentralization (super node mechanism), thus achieving both performance and decentralization. Compared to PoA chains such as BSC and side-chain solutions such as Polygon, Avalanche offers superior performance while achieving a higher level of security.

Performance benefits mean better use experience. Without the high cost of on-chain operations and slow transaction confirmation times at Avalanche, the cost and time of deploying or using DeFi applications will be significantly reduced for developers and regular users alike.

AVAX is Avalanche's native token. Primarily used to pay gas bills, pledge to secure the network, and provide a basic unit of account between multiple subnets created at Avalanche.