The requirements people place on blockchains are ever growing. People want a high level of TPS while having networks be decentralized and safe from any form of attack. Several blockchains have sacrificed part of their design to fulfill this next level blockchain that will trump Ethereum. Avalanche claims that it delivers in all areas bringing forward "the world's fastest blockchain", is their claim true or is this another "Ethereum killer" with more bark than bite?
Background
Ava labs was founded in 2018 and was building what we today know as Avalanche. They released the private testnet in 2019 and the following year they released their public testnet. The network is being put through extensive testing to see if the project will hold up, it works mathematically but live is a different story.
The network has been put through heavy loads to verify that i t can handle it. The team has actively also been fixing bugs that have been found or discovered to help bring this project closer to finality. It has been given approval by Halborn which works with confirming security on blockchains & smart contract projects. There has been times where the network was put under too much load and went down due to bugs, the team has been actively fixing and bringing the network back up to speed when this happens.
Network
The most impressive thing with Avalanche is that it can stay under 1 second finality time while maintaining over 4.500 TPS per subnet. The main draw of the platform apart from its stable speed is that it allows users to create a custom subnet which effectively means that you can tailor your blockchain to fit you platform and token specifically. These different nodes or subnets can interact with each other, and they all don't have to unified consensus on every single node in the chain.
The network performs this with its Avalanche consensus protocol which strictly handles payments & the Snowman protocol which allows for more advanced smart contracts supported transactions, these take around ~3 seconds opposed to the payment transaction's 1 sec. These subnets have AVAX coins which they can use to interact with each other as well as their own subnet token. Staking rewards for validators & stakers can be both in AVAX & in each respective token. The AVAX coin is being released into circulation from new blocks with a max supply of 720 million, after it gets close to this cap it will start a fee burning mechanism to make the coin deflationary. This also means that stakers/miners won't get any rewards.
With subnets hosting their own contracts and local TPS, they effectively work as a VM (virtual machine) on-chain. This basically means that developers can utilize customized smart contracts and make localized changes to their subnet without that comprising the safety of the blockchain at large. If Avalanche was a net cafe, the subnets would be each individual computer that each user have full control over. In short, no limitation to what each developer is able to perform for their Dapp on their subnet. These subnets also allow cross-chain compatibility with other blockchains.
Use cases
The main idea that the entire blockchain is based around is high speed performance for Dapps built using smart contracts. When apps are created on top of Avalanche and they use the blockchain it will help the AVAX coin as it functions as an intermediary and payment for fees. Investors can use it for payments with AVAX supported wallets or as a potential investment. Same as with other smart contract blockchains, with more users of Dapps the more value the chain holds.
Avalanche today
The chain has hit few snags, that's the point of it being in a testnet after all. So far there hasn't been a major roadblock that would cause issues and prevent the developer's vision from coming to life. It has also started to gain a large following & traction as people seem to be looking for the next coin to fight for the number 1 spot. Cardano's troubled smart contract launch and Solana's chain being taken offline caused issues for these cryptos chances at grabbing Ethereum's spot. Avalanche doesn't have any of those issues and is stable, with functioning customisable smart contracts that is fully decentralized. It is however, still in testing.
Pros
- Staking not locked to native currency
- Really strong blockchain if it works in practice
Cons
- Still in testing & new
- No alternative wallets
- Isn't self funding
- In the case of conflicting validator's transactions can be stuck/delayed.
