Avalanche (AVAX) is among the fastest smart contract platforms in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality, and has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol. Avalanche is a fork from Ethereum, which accommodates launching Ethereum DApps that confirm transactions instantly and process thousands of transactions per second, thus resembling a direct competitor to Solana.

AVAX is used to pay transaction fees and can be staked to secure the network. Avalanche can be used to deploy custom private or public blockchains as “subnets. AVAX has a total supply of 720 million and can handle 4500 transactions per second.

Avalanche was founded back in July 2020. Its source code was released publicly on github on March 2020. Organization wise, Avalanches Development is semi-centralized. Each node on the avalanche network exhibits a single voting power with a leaderless protocol. Avalanche''s Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology may be disruptive to the blockchain technology space due to its ability to combine speed, utility, security, and accuracy at a superior level to other blockchains.