Avalanche is an umbrella platform for launching decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, financial assets, trading and other services.

It aims to be something of a global assets exchange, allowing anyone to launch or trade any form of asset and control it in a decentralized manner using smart contracts and other cutting-edge technologies.

Developers at Ava Labs claim that Avalanche is the first smart contracts network to offer transaction finalization in under one second as standard.

Avalanche launched its mainnet in September 2020. The platform’s native token, AVAX, performs various tasks within Avalanche and also functions as a rewards and payment system for users.

Avalanche Features

• Speed – The Avalanche platform uses a novel consensus protocol created by distributed systems researchers in 2018, also called “Avalanche”, to permanently confirm transactions in 1-2 seconds.
• Scalability – Avalanche handles thousands of transactions per second and can accommodate thousands of validators with no loss of performance.
• Security – Avalanche provides stronger security guarantees than either classical or longest-chain consensus protocols.
• Smart Contract Support – Avalanche supports creation and use of Solidity smart contracts as well as all your favorite Ethereum tools like Remix, Metamask, Truffle and more.
• Private/public Blockchains – Users can create their own public or private blockchains.
• Finance-focused – Avalanche was built with serving financial markets in mind. It has native support for easily creating and trading digital smart assets with complex custom rulesets that define how the asset is handled and traded. The assets could represent financial instruments such as equities, bonds, debt, fractionalized real estate, or anything else.