Who am I?

Agenda

  • What is Avalanche?
  • Avalanche Consensus ☃️
  • Avalanche Platform
  • Avalanche Subnet 🔺
  • Avalanche/Subnet vs. L2
  • Roadmap
  • Q/A

Slides talk.gyuho.dev/kbw2022.html

What is Avalanche?

Overview

Avalanche ($AVAX)

  • Launched in Sep 2020
  • Novel Consensus Mechanism (Snowman)
  • EVM Friendly
  • Fast and Scalable L1 (>2K EVM TPS)
  • Reliable (no downtime, no reorg)
  • Platform for Deploying Subnets

Ava Labs

  • Founded in 2020 by Emin Gün Sirer, ex-Cornell professor, the creator of the first p2p cryptocurrency system in 2003, and Cornell PhDs

Ava Labs builds products and infrastructure that streamline the user experience for web3.

Avalanche Today

>3.6B requests (a day, July 2022) with ~80ms latency

Avalanche Today

Subnet effect -- scales without congestion

subnets.avax.network/stats

Horizontal Scale with Subnets

  • Consensus with sub-second finality (Fast)
  • Decentralized with >1,300 validators (Secure)
  • Subnets for application specific chains (Isolation)

Avalanche Consensus ☃️

Snowman Protocol

Consensus Until Now

Classical (Lamport 1988, Paxos/Raft/etcd)

  • Quick finality but does not scale
  • Quadratic message complexity
  • Permissioned, requires precise membership

Consensus Until Now

Nakamoto (2008, Bitcoin)

  • Robust, no need for precise membership
  • High latency, low throughput
  • Wastes energy, not green, not sustainable

Consensus Until Now

PBFT (1999), HotStuff (Chain BFT 2019)

  • Powers many PoS networks (Tendermint, Diem)
  • Committee/leader-based

Avalanche Family

  • Instant finality, low latency (~1 sec)
  • High throughput (>1,500 TPS on EVM, 5K on X-chain)
  • Scales >10-million nodes
  • Robust, no need for precise membership
  • Leaderless
  • Quiescent, green, sustainable
  • Inspired by epidemic protocols and gossip networks
  • New idea: deliberately metastable

Binary Consensus

  • Pick one red/blue -- no correct answer
  • Adopt the majority color by repeated sub-sampling
  • Consensus results in the entire network agreeing on either red or blue
  • Even with 50/50 split, random perturbation in the sampling results in a single value being selected

YouTube Link

Avalanche Platform

Platform Overview

Primary Network

  • X-chain runs on DAG, used for exchanging assets
  • P-chain coordinates validators and subnets
  • C-chain executes EVM contracts with ETH RPCs

Subnet validator must validate primary network!

Avalanche Subnet 🔺

What is Subnet?

Subnet (sub-network)

Subnet (sub-network)

Custom networks running on Avalanche

  • Security: Choose who and how many can participate
  • Compliance: Comply with specific industry, jurisdiction, regulatory environment
  • Custom Execution: Common VM (subnet-evm with custom gas token), custom VM optimized for own use case (key-value store, gaming)
  • Privacy: Controls data visibility (encryption)

Effects of Subnet

Avalanche/Subnet vs. L2

What about L2s? Comparative Analysis

Our Approach for Scalability

Subnets == uniform way of scaling with uniform API

What about sharding?

What about Layer 2s?

  • Can Subnet provide its own security? Yes
  • Can Subnet rely on shared security? Yes
  • Can you build L2 with Subnet? Yes

L2 (rollups) vs. Subnet

Rollup Security + Dispute Resolution: Base blockchain (where security is provided) must be able to execute arbitrary L2 state transitions to resolve disputes.

Subnet: Subnets are sovereign networks and provide their own security. State transitions do not need to be runnable on another (root) blockchain.

L2 (rollups) vs. Subnet

Rollup Fault Isolation: If the root blockchain halts, the L2 cannot finalize data.

Subnet: Subnets are their own networks. If Avalanche halts, Subnets will continue finalizing data independently (they run their own consensus).

L2 (rollups) vs. Subnet

Rollup Time-To-Finality: To ensure there is sufficient time to dispute state roots committed to the root blockchain, finality must be >6 hours (in some cases 7 days).

Subnet: Subnet finality is achieved in sub-second. Subnets use the same consensus engine implementation as the Avalanche Primary Network.

Subnet Security Considerations

  • Control key management
  • Validator count and reputation
  • Data replication and peer count
  • Virtual machine correctness
  • Subnet Visibility (public or private)

Roadmap

What's Next?

Roadmap

  • Permissionless Subnet Staking
  • Cross-Subnet Bridging
  • New SDKs and VMs (Rust VMs)

Getting started?

Welcome to Multiverse

Avalanche Foundation Launches Incentive Program to Accelerate Growth of Subnets