Avalanche was launched by Ava Labs, founded by Cornell University professor Emin Gün Sirer, and Cornell University computer science PhD’s Kevin Sekniqi and Maofan “Ted” Yin. Gün Sirer is a veteran in cryptographic research, having designed a conceptual peer-to-peer virtual currency six years before the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper. He was also involved in work on Bitcoin scaling solutions and research on Ethereum before the infamous The DAO hack in 2016. From that research arose the whitepaper that led to the foundation of Ava Labs in 2018. The project closed a seed round in February 2019 that included investors such as Polychain, Andreessen Horowitz and Balaji Srinivasan. Avalanche closed its initial coin offering in 2020 in under 24 hours, raising $42 million in the process.

Avalanche attempts to solve the [blockchain trilemma], which posits that blockchains cannot achieve a sufficient degree of decentralization at scale. A consequence of this are high gas fees, as is often the case on Ethereum. To solve this problem, Avalanche designed three interoperable blockchains. * The Exchange Chain (X-Chain) is employed to create and exchange the native AVAX tokens and other assets. Similar to the ERC-20 standard on Ethereum, these tokens follow a set of standardized rules. It uses the Avalanche consensus mechanism. * The Contract Chain (C-Chain) hosts smart contracts and decentralized applications. It has its own Avalanche Virtual Machine, similar to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, allowing developers to fork EVM-compatible DApps. It uses the Snowman consensus mechanism. * The Platform Chain (P-Chain) coordinates network validators, tracks active subnets and enables the creation of new subnets. Subnets are sets of validators, sort of like a validator cartel. Each subnet can be validating several blockchains, but a blockchain can only be validated by one subnet. It also uses the Snowman consensus mechanism. This division of computing tasks enables higher [throughput] without compromising on decentralization. For instance, private blockchains on the network could require its subnet’s validators to be sufficiently geographically decentralized or comply with certain regulations. Following this modular structure, Avalanche improves its interoperability with other blockchains wishing to integrate with the Avalanche ecosystem. Furthermore, the two different consensus mechanisms are designed with each blockchain’s requirements in mind, further improving their efficiency.

The total supply of AVAX is 720 million. Its token distribution is as follows: * 2.5% - seed sale, with 10% released on mainnet launch and the rest being released every three months. * 3.5% - private sale, with 10% released on mainnet launch and the rest being released every three months. * 10% - public sale, with 10% released on mainnet launch and 15% released every three months over a period of 18 months. * 9.26% - allocated to the foundation, released over ten years. * 7% - community endowment, released over twelve months. * 0.27% - testnet incentive program, released over one year. * 5% - strategic partners, released over four years. * 2.5% - airdrops, released over four years. * 10% - team, released over four years. * 50% staking rewards Staking AVAX currently provides an annual reward of 11.57%, with the minimum time for staking being two weeks with a minimum of 2,000 AVAX.

AVAX is traded on the Exchange Chain, which follows its own Avalanche consensus mechanism. Unlike proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, the Avalanche consensus mechanism does not have one leader processing transactions that get validated by others. Instead, all nodes process and validate transactions by employing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) protocol. That way, transactions are processed simultaneously, and validators' random polling ensures that transactions are correct with statistical certainty. There are no blocks in this consensus mechanism, allowing immediate finalization and significantly improving the blockchain’s speed.

AVAX is available on [Binance], [Bitfinex], [Gate.io] and [Kucoin].