A cheat sheet to illustrate details on Investors checklist for Blockchains . Data or stats are not authoritative and picked from scans of tweets, discord , telegram reddit etc 2021 Q4 and some references are provided. In case of any misses do let me know and I will update. These notes are more on under-the-hood engineering look. A separate article will cover the business development viewpoint
I use the trading ticker rather then name and for example for Axie Infinity blockchain game $AXS implies the coin or token and AXS implies the foundation/DAO/founders as appropriate
Status : DRAFT
Basics
Price Action
Stats and Links
Highlight Pro and Con
Technology
Apps Ecosystem
Funds and Promotions
Readings
Founded in 2018 by computer science professor Emin Gün Sirer while a professor at Cornell University and built by blockchain development firm Ava Labs and launched in September 2020. Claims 4,500 tps and sub 3 seconds finality.
AVAX saw 62 Million Transaction in 2021 and can scale much more. 800K MAU and 18K+ smart contracts deployed and peak 800 TPS+ observed
14X Return from 2021 low to high and 3.16 USD ( Jan 1) - 109.978 USD (Dec 31) for 3,379.55% return in 2021
Community Stats 32K+ Reddit 530K+ Twitter 45K+ Telegram , 12K+ Developers,
Website Explorer EVM C Chain explorer Telegram Discord Github Twitter Reddit Youtube Linkedin
Modular with ability of a separate ‘app’ specific sub net or L2 chain
EVM compatibility option
Fast DAG ( Directed Acyclic Graph) selection for chain validation
Rich DeFi apps ecosystem
Sub net can support ability for Permissioned Initiators for FATF travel rule
DeFi yields are not as competitive as on other chains
Centralization of sers. with 37% of $AVAX in 30 wallets may not be a concern if CEX like Binance and Coinbase are holding them
AVAX uses a modular approach where primary network supports 3 separate sub nets or block-chains and more can be added. Default contract execution is a different Exchange chain (X-Chain) from the consensus protocol on the Platform P-chain and an (optional ) Ethereum compatible EVM on Contract C-chain. The Avalanche primary network or block chain coordinates across these 3 and optional more subnets or block chains (L2 ). This is a variation of modular architecture used by Polkadot, Cosmos and L2 Rollup of Ethereum ( Polygon, Arbitum, Optimism , Skale etc..)
The X-Chain is used to mint assets on Avalanche. The P-Chain makes it possible to create customizable blockchains called subnets ( like parachains in Polkadot), which leverage Avalanche’s existing validators. Validators need 2000 $AVAX to stake are required to be a member of the Primary Network; all other subnets are optional. Each subnet can have multiple blockchains, just like the primary network, and each blockchain can have its virtual machine. So you can copy the Ethereum virtual machine just like the direct chain did with the C-chain or develop your own and leverage Avalanche as the base layer as intended.
The subnet can be permissioned and require KYC/AML identity for an enterprise or government use case and may have their own tokens.
An snapshot of the Avalanche Explorer on subnets in play via Avax Explorer.
Consensus
Avalanche is a POS block chain with 1,000+ validators and uses Classical and Nakamoto consensus borrowing from from a white paper
"Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies" developed by a pseudonymous group named Team Rocket in May 2018. AVAX uses DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) and nodes execute random patterns many times over and over and periodically update their state until a consensus is reached.
AVAX provides on-chain governance for critical network parameters where participants can vote on changes to the network and settle network upgrade decisions democratically
Avalanche has a fixed capped supply of 720 million of $AVAX and a stake and burn mechanism .At launch, 360 million AVAX were minted and sold through private and public sales. The remaining 360 million AVAX are for staking rewards distributed over the following decades. Of the minted tokens, there are various vesting periods from one year to 10 years.
Pangolin was first DeFi app on AVAX and Trader Joe is popular DEX ( swap). BenQi is lending borrow like AAVE . The frog nation DeFi are present. AAVE, SUSHI,TIME,SPELL, RBN , AUTO . Yetiswap is the app for minting NFT on C-chain . There are over 400+ projects on the tracker and progress may stall with intense paucity of developers in the crypto space
AVAX has active bridge to Ethereum and u can transfer ERC-20 tokens from Ethereum to Avalanche and back . It costs some fees and may take 10 minutes of confirmations. There is a lot of work underway in cross chain transactions and DeFi apps like MULTI ( ex Anyswap $ANY) are pioneering . ( ToDo: a separate note in future) .
See Defillama list. There are the category tracked on Avaxholic website
and Coin98 has a large infographic
720 Mill tokens total supply . 50% staking rewards, 17% team & contributors ,9.26% Foundation, 11% Private sale & strategic partners, ~12% Public sale and airdrops etc
Funding
AVAX raised $18 million 2020 and 230 Million with Polychain and Three Arrows Capital and others in 2021 and $42 million from their public AVAX token sale in July 2020.
Ava Labs President John Wu will also lead Blizzard with sees 200 Million for developing the ecosystem with investors including participation from the Avalanche Foundation, Ava Labs, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital and CMS Holdings, among others. Avalanche Rush was 180 million DeFi liquidity mining incentive program launched Aug 2021. Avalaunch is a launchpad for Avalanche projects and Lydia Finance a clone of BSC Pancakeswap AMM is a good place to see new projects in Initial Farm Offerings or IFOs. Colonylab , a community-drive accelerator.
Readings
The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Avalanche
Avalanche 🔺 Foundation 'Multiverse', a $290m incentive program
Mar 8, 2022 @DefiKingdoms will be receiving $7.5M in $AVAX incentives for Crystalvale subnet
State of Avalanche Q2 2022: Messari
