Avalanche AVAX

Avalanche was developed by Ava Labs under the leadership of Cornell University professor Emin Gün Sirer — a renowned computer science and cryptography researcher. Sirer previously discovered and documented the Selfish Mining attack on Bitcoin. Kevin Sekniski and Mavis Chi co-created the project with him. Ava Labs received funding from leading venture funds: a16z, Polychain, Dragonfly. The mainnet launched in September 2020.

Avalanche uses the Snow protocol family (Slush → Snowflake → Snowball). Unlike PoW (voting by computing power) and classical PoS (voting by coins), the Snow protocol works through random sampling: each validator randomly polls a small subset of other validators and adopts the majority opinion. The process repeats until confident consensus is reached. This allows transaction finality in under 1–2 seconds with thousands of validators without performance degradation.

Subnets are the most unique feature of Avalanche. Any developer or company can create their own sovereign blockchain network (subnet) that: 1) operates by its own rules (custom virtual machine, token, KYC requirements); 2) is secured by validators chosen by the subnet creator; 3) can still interact with the main Avalanche network. JPMorgan, business payment networks (Spruce), gaming projects (Gunzilla Off the Grid) — all use subnets. This makes Avalanche attractive for enterprise blockchain.

Avalanche is an EVM-compatible blockchain: Ethereum developers can deploy projects with virtually no code changes. Key advantages over Ethereum: transaction finality < 2 seconds (Ethereum ~12 sec); fees significantly lower (though they increased during network congestion); subnet architecture for specialized chains. The main Avalanche network consists of three chains: X-Chain (asset exchange), C-Chain (smart contracts, EVM), P-Chain (validator coordination). Most DeFi activity happens on C-Chain.

AVAX shared the fate of the entire crypto market in 2022: the LUNA/UST collapse in May (destroyed $40 billion) and FTX bankruptcy in November crashed the whole market. Additional factor: Avalanche had close ties with FTX — the exchange invested in the ecosystem, and after its collapse investor concerns intensified. AVAX fell from $140 (ATH November 2021) to $10 (November 2022) — a 93% decline. In 2023–2024 the asset recovered to $30–40 thanks to subnet growth and institutional partnerships.

The maximum supply of AVAX is 720 million tokens. About 360 million are in circulation as of 2024. New AVAX are created as validator rewards and distributed through staking. Staking requires a minimum of 2,000 AVAX for validators or any amount for delegators. AVAX is also burned when paying transaction fees — creating a partially deflationary mechanism. The higher the network activity, the more AVAX is burned by fees.