Throughout this series of articles, we’re looking at the top blockchains in crypto to help you make sense of the alphabet soup of so-called “altcoins” that exists beyond that of Bitcoin’s BTC and Ethereum’s ETH.
We will look at what they are, how they work, what they do, and their pros and cons.
You’ll come out of this series not only with a better sense of what cryptocurrency is all about, but you’ll also understand why the way a token works — the way its blockchain processes transactions — is key to its success or failure as a digital asset.
PYMNTS Blockchain Series: What is Solana?
PYMNTS Blockchain Series: What is Cardano?
So, what is Avalanche?
Avalanche is one of the Ethereum Killer blockchains seeking to steal DeFi, NFT and really any other type of blockchain project from the No. 2 blockchain. Like Ethereum, it is a smart contract platform on which the self-executing contracts and decentralized apps (DApps) that are the building blocks of all crypto and blockchain projects and protocols run.
More here: PYMNTS DeFi Series: What Is a Smart Contract?
With a nearly $22 billion market capitalization as of this writing, it is the No. 12 blockchain. And like a number of the top Ethereum Killers, it has an eminent creator: Emin Gün Sirer, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, where he runs the IC3 – The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts initiative, aimed at advancing the science and applications of blockchain.
Sirer is also the founder and CEO of AVA Labs, which developed the decentralized, open-source blockchain. Note that despite the company’s name, its native token goes by the exchange symbol AVAX. (The Travala travel booking platform beat Sirer to the AVA token).
Avalanche currently offers a speed of 4,500 transactions per second, with the full, production-ready blockchain set to handle 20,000 TPS when work is done. If needed, a Layer 2 build adding another transaction processing layer on top of…
