Overview
Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized finance applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Developers who build on Avalanche can easily create applications and custom blockchain networks with complex rulesets or build on existing private or public subnets.
Avalanche can confirm 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 (Avalanche had over 1,000 full, block-producing nodes on its Denali testnet).
In addition to supporting transaction finality under one second, Avalanche is capable of throughput orders of magnitude greater than existing decentralized blockchain networks (4,500+ transactions/second) and security thresholds well-above the 51% standards of other networks.
AVAX is the capped supply native token of the Avalanche platform. Participants can become full block-producers and validators by staking AVAX and are incentivized to do so because of staking rewards. Fees for all sorts of operations on the network are paid out in AVAX through burning, thus increasing the scarcity of AVAX for all token holders.
On September 2020, Avalanche announced the launch of its mainnnet.
Wrapped AVAX (WAVAX) is the wrapped version of Avalanche (AVAX).