$AVAX: Avalanche Foundation Launches $290 Million Program to Support ‘New Ecosystems’

On Tuesday (March 8), the Avalanche Foundation launched Avalanche Multiverse.

What is Avalanche ($AVAX)?

Below is a brief description of Avalanche from its developer documentation:

“Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Avalanche is the first decentralized smart contracts platform built for the scale of global finance, with near-instant transaction finality. Ethereum developers can quickly build on Avalanche as Solidity works out-of-the-box.

“A key difference between Avalanche and other decentralized networks is the consensus protocol. Over time, people have come to a false understanding that blockchains have to be slow and not scalable. The Avalanche protocol employs a novel approach to consensus to achieve its strong safety guarantees, quick finality, and high-throughput without compromising decentralization.

“AVAX is the native token of Avalanche. It’s a hard-capped, scarce asset that is used to pay for fees, secure the platform through staking, and provide a basic unit of account between the multiple subnets created on Avalanche. 1 nAVAX is equal to 0.000000001 AVAX.“

Avalanche is being developed by Ava Labs, a blockchain startup founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2018 by Professor Emin Gün Sirer (CEO), who does computer science research at Cornell University, Kevin Sekniqi (COO), and Ted Yin (Chief Protocol Architect).

What Are Subnets in Avalanche?

Here is how Jay Kurahashi-Sofue, VP of Marketing at Ava Labs, explains it:

“A Subnet, or Subnetwork, is a dynamic set of validators working together to achieve consensus on the state of a set of blockchains. Each blockchain is validated by exactly one Subnet. A Subnet can validate arbitrarily many blockchains. A node may be a member of arbitrarily many Subnets.

“A Subnet manages its own membership and it may require that its constituent validators have certain properties. This is very useful and we explore its ramifications in more depth below.

“There is a special Subnet called the Primary Network, which validates Avalanche’s built-in blockchains. All members of all Subnets must also be a member of the Primary Network. In order to become a member of the Primary Network, one must stake some Avalanche tokens. The upshot of the preceding two points is that all validators of all blockchains must also validate Avalanche’s built-in blockchains and must have staked Avalanche tokens.”

Avalanche Foundation Launches $290 Million Incentive Program

Earlier today, Avalanche Foundation announced that it had “launched Avalanche Multiverse, an up to $290M (up to 4M AVAX) incentive program focused on accelerating the adoption and growth of its novel “subnet” functionality, which enables a rich ecosystem of scalable app-specific blockchains.” To begin with, this program is “focused on supporting new ecosystems including, but not limited to, blockchain-enabled gaming, DeFi, NFTs and institutional use cases.”

Their blog post went to say that Avalanche Multiverse will “bring a DeFi Kingdoms specific Subnet or ‘appchain’ with a combined maximum of $15M of incentives for $AVAX and $CRYSTAL, a new Avalanche-native token created by DeFi Kingdoms to complement its existing $JEWEL token. Details surrounding the allocation of rewards will be forthcoming.”

Frisky Fox, Executive Director of DeFi Kingdoms, said:

“The entire DeFi Kingdoms universe is written into smart contracts, pushing the envelope of what is possible with blockchain technology. We began looking very early on for technology that could help us scale and introduce new features like using our native tokens for gas fees, without sacrificing security or decentralization. Avalanche’s revolutionary subnet technology is the perfect fit.“

Also, Ava Labs, which is a core developer of the Avalanche client, will “collaborate with the Aave Companies, Golden Tree Asset Management, Wintermute, Jump Crypto, Valkyrie, Securitize and others to build the first horizontally-integrated blockchain specifically engineered for Institutional DeFi with native KYC functionality,” which will “enable regulated institutions to leverage the power of Subnets to access DeFi primitives at scale and accelerate the institutional adoption of DeFi.”

Stani Kulechov, Founder and CEO of Aave, had this to say:

“Avalanche Subnets enable us to create an ideal environment for institutions to migrate on-chain and experience the power of DeFi protocols first-hand as users rather than just as investors. This is a significant leap toward a future where the barriers between traditional and decentralized finance cease to exist.“

And Saurabh Sharma, Partner and Head of Venture Investments at Jump Crypto, added:

“DeFi will increasingly become the foundation of the global financial system. Working with Ava Labs to create a space for institutions to adopt DeFi at scale aligns perfectly with our objective of helping builders build the blue chip financial projects of the future.“

Emin Gün Sirer, Director of the Avalanche Foundation, offered the following comment:

“Subnets will be the next growth engine in crypto, enabling novel functionality only possible with network-level control and open experimentation on a scale we haven’t yet seen. Smart contracts underpinned the amazing innovation in blockchains over the last five years, and no technology is better positioned to help carry on this tradition than Subnets.“

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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