Avalanche Protocol — The Best Completion Plan of ETH 2.0
Judy：I first met Avalanche Protocol during bear market run and hold AMA with AVAX today with a depressing market trend. However, no matter what situation it is, opening positions at low prices is always a sensible action. If you had seen the situations today, you would feel so regret for the cheap AVAX, BTC, ETH you didn’t buy in the past days, but when the market is in the dip, you must believe without a shadow of doubt that blockchain is a scam. One of my most thought-provoking sayings goes that: The poor still remain pool under such a loose monetary policy because money release by central banks have become rewards of the rich who know market rules better.
Today, we are honored to have President of Avalanche John Wu, Chief Protocol Architect Maofan “Ted” Yin, Head of China Wilson with us, to introduce Avalanche Protocol in details for us.
John, could you give us a brief introduction about Avalanche? What is its vision and mission?
John: Avalanche is a new public blockchain that is powered by Avalanche Consensus, a breakthrough new consensus algorithm that delivers higher throughput, lower latency and unprecedented levels of decentralization.
Our mission is to create the internet of finance. Our view that the killer app for blockchains is peer to peer value transfer and the most promising applications have been finance related so far. Our highly performance consensus and flexible platform allow us to support all types of financial applications with a good user experience (faster confirmations and lower transaction costs)
John, could you also introduce the team of Avalanche, and why you join the team?
John: Prof Emin Gun Sirer and Kevin Sekinqi and Ted Yin who is on the AMA today were the founders of the project. They spun the technology out of Cornell University and established Ava Labs, the development company behind Avalanche in 2018. I joined the project last year when Ava Labs acquired my company Investry. Prof Emin Gun Sirer has been a prominent researcher in the cryptocurrency space having written the second most cited “bitcoin selfish mining” paper and contributing to many of the well known such as ETH and Bitcoin Cash. Ted worked on Hotstuff which is a consensus protocol used by Facebook Libra.
Similar to many members of the Ava Labs team, I too have an affiliation with Cornell. In fact, I studied at Cornell when I was an undergraduate, and did my postgraduate in Harvard University. I started my career in traditional finance at Tiger management. For those who are unfamiliar, Tiger is one of the early hedge funds and founder Julian Robertson was one of the pioneers of the hedge fund business. I also started my own fund called Sureview that was seeded by The Blackstone Group.
I knew Avalanche had the potential to revolutionize finance (both traditional finance and decentralized finance) and it was very natural for me to join the team.
Q1 : What is the next development or operation plan of Avalanche? Have you ever considered enhancing the influence of Avalanche to that of BCH in 2017?
John: The next step in developing avalanche is building a vibrant flourishing decentralized ecosystem. I believe that defi projects are the most promising set of applications to be built on blockchains.
Our community globally is growing rapidly, by looking at our CMC ranking, we believe we are doing great on influencing the whole Blockchain market.
Q2: As the founder of Avalanche Protocol, Professor Gun has a very good reputation in the blockchain industry, builds a strong tech team as Zcash, and ensures powerful technology support for Avalanche. However, there is a cognition gap between blockchain technology and market, how will Avalanche awake public’s in-depth awareness of its technology value?
John: There is always a gap in knowledge between the technology builders and the everyday users. Avalanche has a very technical community (as you know some of the investors in the token sale also participated in the Ethereum ICO and sent tokens from the genesis block) This has helped us build a good developer community but at the end of the day blockchain must be able to target the masses in order to achieve its full potential.
At a high level, Avalanche delivers high performance, decentralization, and is very cheap and lightweight to operate. High TPS and low fees are things that everyone loves. It might not be apparent why decentralization is important now, but when there are blockchains failures like we saw with Solana, it is clear that fault tolerant and decentralization matters to make sure the blockchain is always running. As the size of blockchains grow, users will be able to understand why we need pruning so that nodes do not have to store large amounts of data. Users will be more aware and understand how Avalanche works when they realize it solves their problems.
Q3: As a retail investor, I really want to know as the shining public chain project in 2020, why Avalanche Protocol can compete with Ethereum on technology?
Ted: Because Avalanche is a brand-new consensus mechanism designed from the ground up, it neither belongs to the Nakamoto consensus, nor the traditional BFT full voting consensus. Similar to BFT consensus, Avalanche does not require mining (the so-called “useless work”), but it also has the advantages of Nakamoto consensus like loose requirements for participants, network communication cost which does not increase linearly with the growing participants, and even stronger probabilistic security than Nakamoto consensus under the same conditions. However, Ethereum is based on Nakamoto consensus, which essentially limits its performance.
Ethereum has been launched for many years, and it is undeniable that it has historical position and driving role. But for the real economy such as the retail industry, its cool features are limited by its performance and cost (money) in specific applications. This is a big dilemma facing Ethereum right now. However, the goal of Ava Labs from the very beginning is not only to propose or complete a cool technology, but to keep up with actual needs during our demonstration and realization of the technology. One of our goals is to connect with the real economy: low transaction fees, extremely fast response speeds, making many simple applications directly a reality.
If I were a restaurateur or a self-employed business owner, I can use it to make payments in seconds. Another direct application is to create digital assets on the chain to issue coupons and the like. Besides these applications, there will be more meaningful applications in the future.
Q4: Avalanche adopts a new consensus engine which receives high praise from crypto influencers and is used by many teams to promote their projects. What is the advantage and working principles of Avalanche Consensus?
Ted: The consensus Avalanche uses is a protocol based on the “Gossip Network”. As far as I know, this is also the first protocol achieves consensus by directly using P2P transmission itself. Its basic working principle is similar to “gossiping” in our daily life — such as whether a celebrity’s affair is true. So as a consensus protocol, it hopes that whatever people think about an affair (“true/false”) at the beginning, after a period of repeatedly iterative dissemination, they will randomly check its reality with a small part of people in the crowd and adjust opinions due to mob mentality. In the end, this dynamic process will quickly shrink to one thinking, for example, almost everyone thinks the affair is true.
The advantages of this method are self-evident. As you can see, no matter how massive the crowd is, news spread at exponential speed. Combined with the positive feedback effect, consensus can be reached within a relatively short time no matter how large the network is, making an parliament/congress-like (traditional referendum-based BFT consensus based) inefficient voting process unnecessary.
If interested, you can play with the demo program I built before:
https://tedyin.com/archive/snow-bft-demo/
Q5: Beside a new consensus engine, Avalanche also adopts an innovative architecture. Instead of a single 3-tier structure, Avalanche deploys three chains with different functions, and then build more functions on top of them. Could you outline the function and adopted technology of the three chains?
Ted: Firstly, let me mention the three major chains on Avalanche: X Chain/P Chain/C Chain. As the English names sound confusing at first, let’s call them Exchange Chain, Platform Chain and Contract Chain respectively. The Exchange Chain has lots of functions, but in general you can think of it as an quicker version of Bitcoin with built-in additional UTXO-based digital assets like NFT, user self-issued tokens, etc.. The Platform Chain is responsible for participating in the entry of consensus nodes and future on-chain governance. The Contract Chain is fully compatible with EVM smart contracts.
The netizen who asked this question noticed that among these the three chains, the Exchange Chain uses “Avalanche” consensus engine, while the other two adopt “Snowman”. Firstly, the three chains operate independently. As I said, they have clearly different goals and interact with each other through a logical intermediate pool (chain 1 — intermediate pool → chain 2). However, it is different from the cross-chain between projects which is often mentioned in the cryptocurrency industry. First of all, they have a unified currency unit AVAX which has the same meaning without conversion. Digital assets created on the Exchange Chain (such as self-created token) can be imported into the Contract Chain for operation. Vice versa.
It is worth mentioning that the Avalanche and the Snowman consensus engine are based on the same underlying algorithm, and even share a part of the algorithm implementation. This allows for better integration among our chains, and feasible, fast, and reliable operations between chains. Users who have used wallets may also feel that our inter-chain transfers are almost as fast as ordinary transfers. Rather than calling them “chains”, it would be more appropriate to call them the three “sub-systems” of our platform system. Ordinary users can regard the wallet balances on the three subsystems as checking accounts/savings accounts/term accounts under the same bank account, with different main functions but transferable from one to another.
Q6: Recently, Avalanche have had a lot of activities in China, and have been recognized by many investors. What are the plans for 2021 in China?
Wilson:
In the next few months, our team will focus on: content coverage, community building, and ecological construction.
Content coverage:
To understand the development of a project, you need to learn about it from many aspects like team, background, technology, progress, etc.
As a global project, there still exist many shortcomings in our content coverage in China. Therefore, we will step up to fill this gap for the market to allow more people to learn the progress of our project easily through Chinese.
We will also launch a reward program for those contributed to Avalanche on content end.
Community building:
l While excellent ecosystem requires diverse supporters, a growing community can provide numerous participants for ecological development, verifying technology and enabling well performance of platform applications.
l In order to stimulate the community development, we have launched the City Preacher Program in Greater China to build Sattalite Community in different cities. If you are a firm holder of AVAX with abilities for regional community organization, management and operation, we sincerely invite you to join us and become our City Preachers.
l We offer “One Person One AVAX” incentive plan for every City Preacher. Every new member of Sattalite Community can join the weekly lucky draw (250 AVAX at most) if he/she holds AVAX. We hope every holder who trusts AVAX can be rewarded and can join our community to build this ecosystem together.
l Organizing Sattalite Community is only the first step in our community building. In the second step, we will provide a more generous reward pool for high-quality communities to support various regional community activities. The reward pool of the third step will be larger, but it cannot be announced yet.
Q7: Will Avalanche hold offline meet ups for investors and fans? How to motivate Chinese developers in future?
Wilson:
Our main focus in the past two months is community building, so the offline meet up is also a very important part. But due to the epidemic, it is difficult for US colleagues to come here to support our community members. Ecological construction is an important foundation of developer incentive . We will take community construction as our first priority, then we will incentive developers.
Ecology Construction:
l ·Ecological construction involves two core parts, 1) ecology of technical community; 2) implementation of technology applications
l I believe that many developers have encountered many problems in the development process on other platforms, such as slow feedback, inadequate technical support, language barrier, cross-chain difficulties, etc.
l · The first is the technology ecology: the implementation of technology applications firstly requires the development of a technology ecology to support more developers from the technology end
l · Therefore, we will start building our original technical community in March. At present, we have commenced on translating the technical documents into Chinese, enhancing technical support in the Chinese-speaking area soon
l · The second is technical application: We welcome teams with development capabilities to develop on the Avalanche platform. Excellent teams can apply for Grant for support.
Therefore, if you are AVAX holder,join our community; If you are capable of community organization, join our City Preacher Program. If you are techno junkies, contact us and start our ecological construction with us.
Finally, remember to join our community, follow our official Wechat account, Weibo, and WeChat community, thank you.
User1: Mass adoption is always a difficult problem for blockchain projects, how Avalanche will solve this problem?
John: Yes you are correct. But just like FB in the US. Before that there was Myspace and before that there was Friendster. When you have new products that are 10x or 100x better, people will adopt it.
User 2：As we all know, Ethereum is the top 1 public chain worldwide. How will AVAX take over the Ethereum market?
John: Thanks for the thoughtful question. 1) we are already seeing people from the ETH community trying out and developing on our chain. They are impressed with the Speed and Scale capabilities of our tech. As they solve some of the current DEFI pain on the Etherium virtual machine. 2) we have a bridge to eth and we can easily bring assets over. 3) we are friends with the eth community. in the end there will be more than one chain.
Judy_host of EncryptClub: Thanks John, Ted and Wilson for joining our AMA and sharing so much valuable information with us. Thank you all for watching this AMA. EncryptClub will work hard and bring more wonderful content for you in future.
