 Avalanche logo | |
| Denominations | |
|---|---|
| Code | AVAX |
| Development | |
| White paper | www |
| Initial release | 21 September 2020 |
| Code repository | github |
| Development status | Active |
| Developer(s) | Avalanche Foundation & Ava Labs |
| Source model | Open source |
| Ledger | |
| Block explorer | explorer |
| Website | |
| Website | www |
Avalanche is a public blockchain and smart-contract platform launched in September 2020 by the American company Ava Labs. The platform's native cryptocurrency is AVAX.
The Avalanche consensus protocol was first described in a May 2018 whitepaper published pseudonymously under the name "Team Rocket." A group of researchers from Cornell University, including Emin Gün Sirer, expanded on this description. Sirer and two PhD candidates formed the company Ava Labs to develop the blockchain for use in the financial industry. The Avalanche network is backed by the non-profit organization, the Avalanche Foundation.
In March 2020, Ava Labs released the Avalanche codebase as open-source. In July 2020, Avalanche raised $42 million in less than five hours during the first public sale of its digital currency token.
In September 2021, the Avalanche Foundation secured a $230 million investment from a consortium including Polychain Capital and Three Arrows Capital by purchasing AVAX.
In August 2022, the whistleblower group Crypto Leaks published a report alleging that Ava Labs had entered secret agreements with Kyle Roche of Roche Freedmen law firm with the intent to legally undermine Avalanche's competitors. Sirer, as CEO of Ava Labs, denied any involvement in illegal or unethical dealings with the Roche Freedmen law firm.
In April 2023, the Cortina upgrade migrated the X-Chain from the DAG-based Avalanche consensus protocol to the linear Snowman++ protocol. The Avalanche9000 upgrade, whose technical core was the Etna network upgrade, activated on mainnet on 16 December 2024. It replaced the requirement that validators of Avalanche L1s stake 2,000 AVAX on the Primary Network with a continuous fee, lowering the cost of launching an L1.
In April 2025, according to the New York Times, Ava Labs donated $1 million dollars to Make America Great Again Inc., coinciding with Ava Labs's president John Wu attending a private fundraising reception with Donald Trump. In August 2025, Anthony Scaramucci announced that his firm SkyBridge Capital would place $300 million, which was 10% of the firm's funds under management, into tokenized assets on the Avalanche blockchain. In January 2026, VanEck launched a U.S.-listed spot Avalanche ETF, which follows spot-ETF launches from Bitwise and Grayscale.
As of January 2026, AVAX trades near $13.8, placing its market cap around $5.9 billion, with daily trading volume often between $400 million and $500 million.
In January 2026, Avalanche launched a $1 million competition to encourage development on the blockchain platform.
On March 17, 2026, the SEC and the CFTC issued a joint press release that classified 16 cryptocurrencies, including AVAX, bitcoin, Ethereum, and others, as "digital commodities" rather than securities.
In January 2026, the State of Wyoming launched the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT) as the first U.S. state-issued stablecoin. FRNT is available on multiple blockchains including Avalanche, Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, and Polygon.
On 22 September 2026, the Helicon upgrade activated on mainnet, introducing auto-renewed staking, a 48-hour minimum validator staking period, a higher uptime requirement for rewards and Continuous Execution on the C-Chain.
Avalanche is a heterogeneous network of blockchains, in which separate chains can be created for different applications. Its Primary Network is a special Avalanche layer-1 (L1) network that runs three interoperable blockchains: the Exchange Chain (X-Chain), the Contract Chain (C-Chain), and the Platform Chain (P-Chain). These chains are used for asset transfers, smart-contract execution, and validator coordination, respectively. Each chain runs as an instance of a separate virtual machine, and AVAX can be moved between the three chains through atomic import and export transactions. Chains communicate with each other and with other Avalanche L1s through Avalanche Interchain Messaging (ICM, also known as Avalanche Warp Messaging), in which a threshold of a source chain's validators sign a message and the signatures are aggregated into a single BLS signature.
The X-Chain is an instance of the Avalanche Virtual Machine (AVM). It is used to create and transfer Avalanche Native Tokens, digital assets that can represent real-world resources such as equity or bonds and can carry rules governing their behavior; AVAX itself is traded on the X-Chain. The X-Chain uses an unspent transaction output (UTXO) model.
The X-Chain originally ran the Avalanche consensus protocol, which is based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and processes non-conflicting transactions concurrently without establishing a total order. Because partial ordering complicated integration with Warp messaging, state syncing and support by exchanges designed for totally ordered blockchains, the 2023 Cortina upgrade "linearized" the X-Chain: the final state of the DAG became the genesis state of a totally ordered chain running Snowman++.
The P-Chain is an instance of the Platform Virtual Machine (PlatformVM) and acts as the network's coordination layer. It tracks Primary Network validators and delegators, their uptime and their staking rewards, and is used to create new blockchains and L1s and to maintain their validator sets.
Since the Etna upgrade (ACP-77), a Subnet can be converted into a sovereign L1 whose validator set is determined by a validator-manager smart contract on the L1; the P-Chain records validator changes authorized by Warp-signed messages. L1 validators are not required to validate the Primary Network and instead pay a continuous fee to the P-Chain.
The C-Chain is an implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It supports smart contracts written in Solidity, is compatible with the Geth API, and has the mainnet chain ID 43114. Ethereum's consensus protocol is replaced by Avalanche's Snowman consensus. C-Chain blocks were executed by Coreth until the Helicon upgrade, after which the chain switched to a Continuous Execution virtual machine that decouples consensus from execution.
Blockchain consensus protocols that preceded Avalanche fall broadly into two families. Classical Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols such as PBFT require knowledge of all participants and provide fast, deterministic finality, but one or more nodes typically process an amount of data linear in the number of participants for every decision, which limits their scalability. Nakamoto consensus, used by Bitcoin, relies on proof of work and the longest-chain rule; it supports a large and open set of participants, but its finality is probabilistic, as blocks can later be dropped from the canonical chain, and its continuous computation consumes considerable energy.
The Snow family of protocols used by Avalanche takes a different approach based on repeated random subsampling: rather than communicating with the whole network, a node repeatedly queries a small, randomly selected set of validators. The protocols are leaderless, and no node processes more than a logarithmic number of bits per decision. Ava Labs describes the approach as combining the fast, irreversible finality of classical protocols with the scalability and robustness of Nakamoto consensus.
The protocol paper describes the family in stages that build on one another. The underlying mechanism is metastability: small imbalances in preference caused by random sampling reinforce themselves until the network converges on a single option.
Snowman is the variant of the protocol for linear, totally ordered chains, which smart contracts require. The C-Chain, the P-Chain and Avalanche L1s run Snowman++, which extends Snowman with a ProposerVM layer that schedules block proposers; since Cortina, the X-Chain does as well.
To decide on a block, a node samples k validators at random, weighted by stake, and asks which block they prefer. If at least α of the responses name the same block, it becomes the node's preference; once the same block wins β consecutive polls, it is accepted. The AvalancheGo defaults are k = 20, α = 15 and β = 20. Because the number of messages per query does not depend on the number of validators, the protocol scales to thousands of validators. A vote for a block also counts as a vote for all of its ancestors. When there are no transactions to process, nodes stop polling, unlike proof-of-work systems, which compute continuously.
Safety is probabilistic: the probability that two correct nodes decide differently on the same transaction can be made arbitrarily small by tuning the parameters. Increasing α raises the number of Byzantine participants the protocol can tolerate while remaining safe, but lowers the number that can halt its progress (liveness). Unlike in Nakamoto consensus, an accepted block is not later reverted; Ava Labs states an acceptance latency of about one second. In the large-scale evaluation reported in the protocol paper, the system achieved about 3,400 transactions per second with a confirmation latency of 1.35 seconds.
To prevent a single actor from dominating the random samples by running many nodes (a Sybil attack), Avalanche uses proof of stake: the probability of a validator being queried is proportional to the amount of AVAX it has staked.
A node must stake at least 2,000 AVAX to become a Primary Network validator. AVAX holders can also delegate their tokens to a validator, which may charge delegators a fee. Avalanche does not use slashing: a validator that fails to meet the uptime requirement or misbehaves receives no reward but recovers its full stake, and rewards are all-or-nothing. The maximum staking period is one year.
Helicon is a Primary Network upgrade that bundles six Avalanche Community Proposals (ACPs). It activated on the Fuji testnet on 28 July 2026 and on mainnet on 22 September 2026 with AvalancheGo v1.15.0. Its changes to staking are:
Helicon also includes two C-Chain changes: Continuous Execution (ACP-194), which separates block acceptance by consensus from execution through a queue, and ACP-283, which makes the minimum gas price dynamic, set by stake-weighted validator preference.
