Avalanche (AVAX)

Avalanche is a layer-1 blockchain platform launched in 2020 by Ava Labs, founded by Cornell professor Emin Gün Sirer. It's designed for high throughput, near-instant finality, and low transaction costs.

Avalanche uses a unique consensus mechanism that allows thousands of validators to participate while maintaining fast finality (under 2 seconds). This makes it one of the fastest smart contract platforms available.

AVAX is the native token of the Avalanche network, used for paying transaction fees, staking, and securing the network. It has a capped supply of 720 million tokens.

The platform supports multiple virtual machines and allows the creation of custom subnets—independent networks that can have their own rules, validators, and virtual machines while benefiting from Avalanche's security.

Avalanche uses a novel consensus protocol called Avalanche Consensus, which combines classical and Nakamoto consensus properties. Validators repeatedly sample a random subset of other validators, quickly converging on consensus.

The network consists of three built-in chains: X-Chain (for creating and trading assets), C-Chain (EVM-compatible smart contracts), and P-Chain (for validator coordination and subnets).

Subnets are custom blockchain networks that can run on Avalanche. They allow projects to create their own blockchains with custom rules while inheriting Avalanche's consensus and security properties.

Validators stake AVAX to participate in consensus. The minimum stake is 2,000 AVAX for validators and 25 AVAX for delegators. Rewards are distributed based on stake and uptime.