Avalanche (AVAX) was formerly known as Ava/AVA and is an open-source platform for launching highly decentralized applications, new financial primitives, and interoperable blockchains. Using a groundbreaking consensus protocol architecture, it is a smart contract platform that confirms transactions within seconds, supports the full suite of Ethereum development toolkits, and makes millions of full block producers possible.
Avalanche was co-founded by Cornell University Professor and IC3 co-founder Emin Gün Sirer, computer scientist Kevin Sekniqi, and Ted Yin, the primary author of the Facebook Libra protocol HotStuff consensus. The AVA blockchain platform, primarily developed by Avalanche, is a digital payment and computing platform built on a revolutionary consensus algorithm – Avalanche. This consensus enables distributed ledgers to achieve high decentralization, high concurrency processing, and rapid transaction confirmation, while also implementing historical record pruning and on-chain governance. At the core of the AVA blockchain platform is a unified and interoperable infrastructure that allows anyone to build their own blockchain network or issue assets on the blockchain within the AVA ecosystem based on their specific needs.