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Avalanche, one of the many blockchain networks that claim to be faster, cheaper and more capable than Ethereum, announced the "Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge," a way to transfer Ethereum tokens to the Avalanche blockchain and vice versa. Avalanche's bridge is powered by ChainSafe, a blockchain interoperability protocol produced by ChainBridge. ChainBridge built Avalanche's bridge using funds from the Avalanche-X grants program. Avalanche's mainnet launched in September after raising $60 million, $42.5 million of which came from a public token sale.

Avalanche is a platform that enables people and enterprises around the world to build decentralized solutions at scale. Now with Avalanche running on mainnet, we wanted to compile a deep overview of the platform to help you get up to speed on how the Avalanche platform works.

Avalanche consensus, like Nakamoto consensus, is a probabilistic protocol. Just as Nakamoto traded off a small chance in probability for performance, Avalanche embraces probability to make the chance of error just as microscopic (and better yet, like all parts of Avalanche, configurable by validators on custom subnets).

Avalanche (AVAX) price hit a new all-time high of $68.89, following the announcement that a handful of large funds, including Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital and Dragonfly capital, took part in a $230-million funding round for the project. The layer-one protocol which hopes challenge the Ethereum network's dominance among smart contract platforms, is capable of surpassing 4,500 transactions per second with a time to finality of less than 2 seconds. Also, the Avalanche network is cross-chain compatible with Ethereum, meaning any tokens or projects that operate on Ethereum can fully migrate to the Avalanche ecosystem.

The Avalanche Foundation is allocating up to $50 million to purchase tokenized assets minted on the Avalanche blockchain. Dubbed Avalanche Vista, the new program is designed to support and demonstrate the value of tokenizing a wide range of asset classes, such as equity, credit, real estate, and more.

Smart contract platform Avalanche will launch on September 21. Avalanche purportedly will deliver sub-second transaction finality, support the entirety of the Ethereum virtual machine and development toolkit, and enable up to millions of independent validators to participate as full, block-producing nodes. Avalanche is capable of throughput orders of magnitude greater than existing blockchain networks (4,500+ transactions/second), and security thresholds well-above the 51% standards of other networks.

The Avalanche network has come to a near halt after "a bug in the cross-chain functionality" code that enables the Avalanche protocol and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to speak with each other failed under high loads. The release of Avalanche's newest decentralized finance (DeFi) product, money market Pangolin, snowballed into "insane load" for the network, which further "triggered a very low probability bug that produced a bad state in the network".

Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching DeFi applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. It is the first smart contracts platform that confirms transactions in under one second, supports the entirety of the Ethereum development toolkit and enables millions of independent validators to participate as full block producers. The testnet had over 1,000 full, block-producing nodes, breaking a world record. In addition to supporting sub-second finality, Avalanche is capable of throughput orders of magnitude greater than existing blockchain networks (4,500+ transactions/second), and safety thresholds well-above the 51% standards of other networks.

Circle has launched a mainnet protocol that lets users transfer its USDC stablecoin between Ethereum and Avalanche. Previously, Avalanche users who held USDC on Ethereum had to deposit their coins with a Circle partner or use a third-party bridge to transfer their USDC from one network to the other. The new Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) protocol appears to do away with this need for USDC bridges. Unlike a traditional bridge, it doesn't lock tokens sent to its contract. Instead, it completely destroys them and issues new tokens on the receiving network. Users can redeem these new tokens for bank deposits directly, by depositing the tokens with Circle or its partners.

"Avalanche price skyrocketed 35% from $12.23 to $16.55 mid-week. This followed the news that Ava Labs, the company behind the Avalanche blockchain project, had partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to scale blockchain solutions access to institutions, governments and enterprises. It is expected that the news will sustain AVAX's recovery to higher levels."

"Avalanche is one of the fastest growing networks in crypto. The network, which is powered by the AVAX coin, is more scalable and efficient than Ethereum. Avalanche is a type of network that is referred to as an "Ethereum Killer". "

Avalanche is launching a Visa Card that will allow cardholders to spend their digital assets directly from their wallets without the need to convert the assets into fiat currencies. The card will allow owners to complete payments using digital assets in any location or jurisdiction accepting Visa. It will come in the form of a self-custody wallet with a unique address per asset, in come in both physical (card) and virtual (app) form factors. The Avalanche Card will initially be available only to individuals that are residents of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, except residents or citizens of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Citizens of Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran, along with the regions of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk are not eligible to sign up. https://x.com/AvalancheFDN/status/1848470963672711543

Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching DeFi applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. It is the first smart contracts platform that confirms transactions in under one second, supports the entirety of the Ethereum development toolkit and enables millions of independent validators to participate as full block producers. In addition to supporting sub-second finality, Avalanche is capable of throughput orders of magnitude greater than existing blockchain networks (4,500+ transactions/second), and safety thresholds well-above the 51% standards of other networks.

The past three months of Avalanche and some short thoughts on the months ahead:

Avalanche works. Really really well. So what is Team Prospero going to build with it? For starters, we've already mini-pivoted from the basic "turn your credit card change into crypto" play into social DeFi portfolio management. In order for DeFi to reach its full mainstream potential, we believe that engagement with crypto markets needs to be as intuitive as using Robin Hood. That's why we're building DeFi Portfolios for the People.

In the race to produce the fastest, most feature-complete blockchain there is, a handful of major players have emerged in the last year. Among these, Avalanche-an open-source platform for new financial primitives and decentralized applications-has emerged as one of the front-runners.

The Avalanche Foundation has announced a new $220 million investment fund, named Blizzard, that it hopes will attract developers focused on decentralized finance (DeFi), enterprise applications, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and culture. The program will also assist promising projects with equity investments, token purchases and other kinds of operational support. Outside funding came from Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital, CMS Holdings, Republic Capital, R/Crypto Fund, Collab+Currency, Lvna Capital and Finality Capital Partners.

Circle launched its Euro Coin on Avalanche, the first in a series of expected multi-chain launches, following the initial launch on Ethereum last year (2022). Circle currently maintains two fiat-based stablecoins, USD Coin (with a market capitalization of about $29 billion), and Euro Coin ($48 million).

"Avalanche is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) platform for creating digital assets, smart contracts, and application-specific blockchains. The network has a two-pronged strategy for optimizing performance: 1) novel consensus mechanisms that offer high throughput and speed with low fees, and 2) scaling horizontally by allowing projects to deploy their own subnetworks (subnets)."

As first envisioned in a 2018 white paper by the pseudonymous "Team Rocket," the Avalanche protocol uses random network sampling to reach consensus. But it is AVA Labs' (www.avalabs.org) ambition in building new infrastructure for the financial markets that now drives the firm forward.