Avalanche

Avalanche (AVAX) is a high-throughput Layer 1 smart contract platform developed by Ava Labs, co-founded by Cornell computer science professor Emin Gün Sirer. Its mainnet launched in September 2020 with the goal of combining fast transaction finality with low fees and an energy-efficient design. AVAX is the network's native token, used for fees, staking, and securing the platform.

How it works

Avalanche is built around a family of consensus protocols in which validators repeatedly sample small random subsets of other validators to converge quickly on agreement. Combined with Proof of Stake — validators lock up AVAX to participate and earn rewards — this allows the network to finalize transactions in seconds.

The platform is organized into three built-in chains with distinct roles: the X-Chain for creating and transferring assets, the C-Chain, an Ethereum-compatible chain where most smart contracts and DeFi activity live, and the P-Chain, which coordinates validators and custom networks. Because the C-Chain runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine, developers can deploy existing Solidity contracts with minimal changes.

Supply and ecosystem role

AVAX has a hard cap of 720 million tokens. A notable feature of its economics is that transaction fees are burned rather than paid to validators, permanently removing those tokens from circulation, while validators are compensated through staking rewards from the remaining unminted supply.

Beyond its primary chains, Avalanche lets projects launch their own custom blockchains — originally called subnets — with their own rules and validator sets while drawing on Avalanche's infrastructure. This has made the platform a home for DeFi protocols, gaming projects, and institutional tokenization experiments alongside its core smart contract activity.