AVALANCHE BLOCKCHAIN : A BRIEF INTRO AND THE WAY FORWARD

So if you have some knowledge in distributed systems you will discover that there is some technical breakthrough and one of them has to do with Nakamoto Consenus,Satoshi was able to improve on Adam Back’s Proof of Work system in Hashcash. Hashcash was a proof of work system to stop email spam,as a sender of the mail you are required to compute and attach a hash to the email unlike in today’s world where there are no constraints in the creation of fake accounts

Let’s talk about the works of Leslie Lamport and other works like Paxos,PBFT,HotStuff,when you want to build systems in such a way that all members in the network has to be known,it cannot actually scale when it comes to the speed at which data in that network can be processed,so we have the constraint that has to do with speed and that of centralization(permissioned network),

The 2008 financial crisis brought the confidence in governments and financial institutions to question,Satoshi came up with Bitcoin,it’s going to work with a network technology called the Blockchain,before bitcoin one has to understand that one of the problems that crippled classical consensus was the issue of incentive : WHAT’S IN FOR ME, with Nakamoto consensus,validation and security are rewarded and the network is permissionless,anyone can join and leave any time.

With a growing network size,slow transaction throughput,environmental concerns and an ever increasing centralized mining by a few coupled with the lack of drive to evolve,there is a need to try another leg with other solutions.

Post bitcoin

A brief skim through coinmarketcap.com,one is amassed by the number of different coins,tokens,blockchains that are trying to solve different problems,most of the existing blockchains are either copying bitcoin or classical consensus,many of these project are copycats.

Let’s take a look at litecoin,the codebase is pretty the same,the only change we can is that of the coin supply,so we may say bitcoin is gold while litecoin is silver lol,this is ridiculously funny.

To solve blockchain fundamental problems,there is a need to go back to the FOUNDATIONS,the roots where everything began from,many are busy plucking out the branches or leaves and will realize too late that trees are best uprooted from the root.

You can liken AVA to legos

Kids play with legos,the build and take down with legos but when they have toys they are constrained,they cannot take it apart and build something that is in their mind.

Just like the internet,there are different protocols and standards that govern communication flow, there are seven layers to the network,blockchain started with payments in bitoin but today we see beyond that and we also need to braise up for what is possible tomorrow,

In AVA,you can create your own kind of network inside the network to suit your need(this is called subnets),you may call it child chains or child networks,it can be customized with different parameters to suit your application(games,payment etc),choose a virtual machine that supports your need or even buy from AVA virtual marketplace that will soon be built and subnets are interoperable with other subnets.

Smart contracts

You can write smart contracts in solidity as many others,AVA has a forked version of Ethereum called Aethereum,it’s Ethereum on AVA,it’s 100% Ethereum,the wallets work the same,our beloved metamask can still be used,now you only leverage AVA speed while you enjoy all the current Ethereum community solutions like metamask,truffle etc.

In the future,the project plans to support the solidity++ language and other execution environments like WASM,DAML etc

Tokens

There will be 720M AVA tokens,initially 360M will be made available upon mainnet,the supply is neither inflationary nor deflationary,the minting is done via decentralized governance as suitable and fit per current prevailing economic situations. If it’s better for the whole ecosystem to increase the supply,then community will vote and increase it and if it’s not,the community will vote as well.
The tokens will be used for transacting in the network and also a means to reward stakers.

The way forward with AVA

Boostrapping a network :Building a solution is not enough,the next thing is how do you boostrap a network of miners(stakers),developers(those who will use or build extensions,modules etc),marketers and ambassadors. The reason why people will still be using Ethereum despite all the current bottlenecks,it’s because it has the numbers,one can easily get funding for ethereum projects,you can easily get help as a developer(lots of tutorials,documentation and implementation in many languages),plenty of developer tools and lots more.
Avalabs knows this and currently running an accelerator called AVA-X.

AVA-X is our accelerator for developers building decentralized finance applications like lending,derivatives,stablecoins and moonshots not yet imagined.

AVA hub : it’s an initiative around social mining,users are rewarded with AVA points that are redeemable for AVA tokens once the platform launches for engaging in many marketing tasks including graphic designs,tweeting,making written and visual contents etc.

You can submit a grant proposal, find bugs that you could earn up to $50,000 in AVA for, build AVA support for Ledger hardware and many more.

AVA team

Emin Gun Sirer : He has been in the virtual currency domain since 2003 with his novel coin called Karma ever before Satoshi showed up with bitcoin,he called out the flaw in Ethereum DAO code that led to the exploitation of $50M but he was not heeded,he has published many papers on how to scale bitcoin,he is a co-director at the initiative for cryptocurrencies and contracts.

One of the co-founders of AVA is the creator of Hotstuff,a consensus protocol that Facebook has adopted for its Libra blockchain project.

Resources

Avalanche website : https://www.avalabs.org/avalanche
Join the AVAx accelerator : https://www.avalabs.org/ava-x
Why AVA : https://www.avalabs.org/why-ava
AVA docs : https://docs.ava.network/
AVA solutions : https://www.avalabs.org/solutions
Ethereum on AVA : https://athereum.ava.network/
AVA team : Emin Gun Sirer, Maofan "Ted" Yin, Kevin Sekniqi and others https://www.avalabs.org/team
Emin Gun Sirer Karma : https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/karma/
Facebook Libra uisng HotStuff : https://developers.libra.org/docs/crates/consensus
Avalanche blockchain in a nutshell : https://steemit.com/blockchain/@bookreviews/avalanche-blockchain-in-a-nutshell

prefer video content,see this exclusive video about AVA :

In the next series,we will examine the AVA consensus protocol and how it works,hope to see you soon.