Last Friday, July 24 from 2PM to 3PM ET, the Ava Labs team hosted an AMA with our community on official Avalanche Telegram. 11 Ava Labs team members joined in to answer the community’s questions and talk about the future of Avalanche. In case you missed the live AMA or wish to review the entire set of questions, below is a full recap of the discussion. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the AMA. We’ll keep everyone posted when we’re set for the next one.
Q: I am intrigued to know how did you solve the major problem of system requirements needed to achieve a larger level of decentralization network? What will be the low system requirement? When will the details regarding the same will be out? I just can’t wait to put my first node!
A: The Avalanche network utilizes a new family of consensus algorithms that remove bottlenecks of other existing systems. Specifically, most other forms of PoS systems utilize consensus algorithms that incur an amount of work that is at least proportional to the number of nodes in the system. In some of these systems the factor can be more than O(n), sometimes O(n²) or even O(n³). However, in Avalanche, the amount of work to achieve consensus is essentially independent of the number of nodes in the network. Avalanche is very similar to bitcoin style PoW with this respect. The reason why PoW systems are still relatively centralized is because of the requirement to use mining pools to reduce reward variance. However, because Avalanche utilizes a new PoS model that doesn’t relate to vertex issuance this incentive doesn’t exist. This is what gives Avalanche the ability to be extremely decentralized. As for the system requirements, these are currently listed in our docs (you can start running a node today on the Denali testnet).
Q: What is the state/status of ZKsnarks and other privacy tools for Avalanche? A genomic blockchain consortium decidedly interested in building an Athereum subnet would like to use them or something similar.
A: We will be focusing more on privacy features after we get mainnet out. Our multi-chain model will let us try a variety of approaches, for example on the X-chain we could easily support CoinJoin-style privacy protocols while also experimenting with ZK proof-based privacy schemes on a new chains. I’m also looking forward to playing with SNARKs and protocols like Tornado on the Ethereum-compatible C-Chain.
Q: Time to the market is extremely important. It is clear that other blockchains have a time advantage and gain a larger market share. How will Avalanche deal with this apart from relying on its technologically advanced blockchain architecture?
A: AVA Labs is a world-class team of experts in computer science, economics, finance, and law. We’re very much in “startup mode” and are laser-focused on delivering extremely high-quality products at scale and velocity. We intend to leverage domain-expertise, industry best-practices, and lots of hard work to remain competitive and innovative.
Q: Will AVAX token also be a governance token? What are the requirements for participating in governance?
A: Yes, $AVAX will be a governance token. For staking the requirements are to lock up at least 2000 $AVAX for between 2–52 weeks. More info: Section 2 Governance
Q: As Avalanche is using pruning else the number of transactions would result in tens of TB of data per year, what is the actual space consumption that was perhaps observed during Denali with over 1000 validators? Is it right to assume that the required space will be constant (minimal) over the coming months and years, or does the architecture (of Avalanche/Snow family) require a steady increase in disk space consumption (albeit small)?
A: Avalanche does not require any increase in disk space. The size of the state that is used by nodes is defined by what each VM defines as its current state. We are currently working on implementing the pruning system right now. So, currently, when a node enters into the network it performs full sync of the entire history of the network. Once pruning is introduced the synced state (by default) will only be a function of the current state of the network as defined by the VMs.
Q: Are there any existing or upcoming DeFi projects or dex that would like to join Avalanche?
A: The team has extensive backgrounds in both traditional finance and crypto. We will leverage every and all connection we have to crypto projects including but not limited to DeFi and DEXs. So far, we have confirmed integrations with crypto projects like BiLira, Chainlink, and Torus–with more to come.
Q: Will we have any Avalanche dapps available after mainnet launch? How this dapps will answer the question of “Why Avalanche”?
A: Avalanche will have as many dapps as it can–so long as the projects are willing to integrate and build on Avalanche. These dapps will see and experience first-hand the power of Avalanche.
Q: How easy an Ethereum dapps can completely move to Avalanche?
A: The C-Chain is an instance of the Ethereum Virtual Machine powered by Avalanche. One can create smart contracts on the C-Chain and do anything else they would do on Ethereum by using the C-Chain’s API.
Q: How easy for a developer to start building with Avalanche? What’s your strategy to build your developer community after mainnet?
A: We’ve focused on building our developer community from day 1. We will continue to aggressively grow our community. Like with the answer to the above, we are trying to minimize friction for devs (i.e., have instances like the Ethereum VM so Ethereum devs can port over their projects without having to learn new languages)
Q: What’s your priorities when looking for a partner? Is there any big name (business partner) is in working now?
A: Our priorities are to grow our presence within DeFi, and on the other hand, engage enterprises and institutions for their distributed systems needs. No big (or small) names can be published until the official announcement ;)
Q: As Ether transaction fees hit 100 gwei, the project’s co-founder warns that a failure to respond could undermine the security of the network (source Cointelegraph.com JUL 22, 2020). Would the AVAX network support the migration of the ETHEREUM network?
A: Avalanche’s C-Chain is an instance of the EVM with Snowman consensus and is 100% backward-compatible with existing Ethereum developer tooling including MetaMask, Truffle, Remix, and more. Our team is happy to help developers migrate apps to the Avalanche ecosystem. Please join us on telegram or discord. More info: Deploy a Smart Contract on Avalanche using Remix and MetaMask, What is the Snowman Consensus Protocol, Avalanche Telegram, Avalanche Discord.
Q: Is there already a partnership between Avalanche-X and Chainlink?
A: Yes, Chainlink is being integrated into Avalanche. More info.
Q: Will it be possible to stake AVAX with a single click, as was done now to open a wallet with an existing Google account?
A: Yes, this will be supported soon. Our team is adding delegation functionality to avalanche.js and to the web wallet. We are actively working with Staking as a Service provider to ensure that there are easier options for staking AVAX–for those who are not as technically savvy.
Q: Supporting NFT is part of the mainnet features which you will release this August. Having said that NFTs usually build as erc721 tokens. However, you have your own blockchain, will you use a common method like of Oxcert plug and play framework to create awesome NFT faster or thinking a new way to build it in a more unique and smooth method?
A: We built NFTs directly into the transaction format of our AVM (X-Chain) itself. It’s actually closer to EIP-1155 (Collectible NFTs) than ERC 721 in design. EIP-1155 is a generalization over ERC721 from a design standpoint anyway. We do not need to use external NFT frameworks, but if you want to build your own VM which supports those NFT frameworks, by all means, write it up!
Q: What are your thoughts on the current state of DeFi market? Do you think it will sustain or do you think its just another bubble?
A: There are some genuinely interesting ideas in the DeFi space. AMMs are quite an elegant solution to the problems of hosting exchange and orderbooks on DLTs. However, clearly stuff like “yield farming” is unsustainable. I feel like the current DeFi situation is a rite of passage for all interesting ideas in the space. It starts with a series of revolutionary ideas, followed by hype, but after the hype cools off, back to building.
Q: Avalanche says 3rd generation is the main protocol. The Avalanche has improved its sideways by removing the missing aspects of Nakamoto and the classic consensus protocol. With this 3rd generation protocol, does avalanche blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem pioneer radical change?
A: Great question about the future. Technology-wise, our first intention throughout the entire research of Avalanche was to decouple different crucial components/algorithms that one “blockchain” system must have. We know Bitcoin has a very monolithic design (as it never mentions the terms of “Sybil prevention”/“BFT consensus”, etc.). But this doesn’t necessarily mean the entire story of blockchain platforms is just like a mixed bag of confusing mechanisms and algorithms. In fact, we’ve been trying our best to break down the main functionality one wants from such systems, and to address each one of them with our best knowledge in distributed systems/security. If you look at the white paper, you’ll realize that the X-Chain (“Avalanche” in the paper) makes use of the property that normal payment transactions do not have to be fully ordered for most of the time and that allows us to apply the Snow (gossip-based sampling) protocol idea very effectively to best avoid its shortcomings.
Overall the shift to a more systematic approach to a blockchain system changes the way we think about building this kind of infrastructure and will reflect a change in the ecosystem in a good way, as the consequence.
Q: Hi everybody! 💪🏻👍 AVAX public sale was planning to be open for 2 weeks. Did you expect that it will end so fast in 4.5 hours?
A: Throughout the weeks leading up to the public sale, we were aware of the overwhelming demand based on social and community sentiment, number of registrations within our public sale portal, and other external factors. This is the primary reason why we increased the allocation for pool A2, to ensure that we could include as many people as possible in the public sale. We couldn’t say for sure how long it would take for the sale to complete, but we were very much aware of the high demand.
Q: If the fees are going to be burnt, which will be the incentive to the miners once all AVAX have been mined?
A: At some point, the Avalanche Network will have to be sustained by fees IMO (though it will take quite a few years before this becomes an issue). Burning fees and reintroducing them via minting, in some ways is equivalent to rewarding fees to stakers. The nice thing about Avalanche's consensus is that it’s super lightweight and efficient. Last time I did some calculations, it costs 5000x less to run the Avalanche network compared to Bitcoin. From an economic perspective, Avalanche is one of the most sustainable networks in existence
Q: I know that Avalanche aims to cover not only the cryptocurrency sector but also the real business market, in order to show all the advantages of decentralized networks. What are your plans to capture the business sector and digitize the assets of real businesses in the Avalanche network?
A: Many of the differentiating capabilities of Avalanche address a lot of key concerns that enterprises have had with using decentralized networks as a whole. To date, enterprises have been forced to choose between public or private blockchains but Avalanche can enable both because of its flexible network architecture. When combined with what we hope will be smooth user experience, businesses adopting Avalanche should just be a natural evolution. To that end, we are also speaking with many tentpole companies in their respective industries to establish compelling case studies for others. Stay tuned on this front — we’ll have a lot more exciting announcements to come!
Q: How does Avalanche deal with the rich-get-richer-problem? Is there some mechanism like the one Cardano has, which leads to less rewards for rich stakers?
A: In Avalanche, staking rewards are proportional to the amount staked. The nice thing about the reward mechanism in Avalanche is that it decreases the variance of rewards for all participants. We, therefore, do not need the equivalent of mining pools (staking pools?) in Avalanche. So everyone can run a node!
Q: Are there any connection about team rocket and satoshi?
A: Interestingly enough, Satoshi is the name of the main character in the Japanese version of Pokemon (English equivalent: Ash Ketchum), and Team Rocket, as we all know, are the antagonists in the story. Maybe there is some connection??? Not sure tho 😁
Q: And I wanted to ask you about your community plans. How long are you planning to use Avalanche HUb and do you satisfied by community impact in general? Maybe some other plans for developing the community ?
A: The Avalanche Hub is a key part of our long-term community growth strategy (and personally, one of my favorite parts of the project to engage with daily). We’ve got some exciting plans to expand the type and reach of tasks through the Hub to showcase how strong the Avalanche community is and grow it further. If you have ideas for tasks, let us know!
Q: What is your biggest worry (knowing that you might not want to tell that)?
A: I think staking delegation has risks associated with it that are hard to predict. Delegation of stake puts a lot of external social factors into a protocol which would ideally not deal with those. Unfortunately, it’s also the best means to remove barriers to entry for low-volume holders and to really give a broader sense of community. I do worry of its long term impact, if not the immediate impact. My gut is that we can see this coming a mile away and intervene as a community before it becomes an issue if such an issue were to pop up.
Q: How are the distribution of check sizes in the token sale, how many participants?
A: Hard to give specific numbers as we are still processing refunds at the moment. But folks from close to 100 countries participated in the sale. As you can imagine, the distribution was quite broad!
Q: How are you making quiescent possible?
A: Avalanche consensus only requires voting while there are outstanding decisions to be made. This means that if there are no transactions being issued to the network, then no nodes will be performing queries. Nodes do still perform some background gossiping of peers + the accepted frontier to make sure that the network is remaining healthy, but consensus only needs to happen when there are pending decisions to be made.
Q: How are you integrating both permissioned and permissionless deployments in AVAX?
A: Currently, the default subnet is the only permissionless subnet on the Avalanche platform. It is possible to create your own permissioned subnets on the Avalanche platform by registering on the P-chain. We will be introducing an additional mechanism to implement permissionless blockchains, based on the blockchains internal ruleset.
Q: How are you solving this big thing of a quantum-resistant virtual machine?
A: Avalanche only requires a very vague knowledge of the structure of the VM that it is performing operations on. It is entirely possible to implement quantum-safe signatures into a VM (or Fx, Feature Extension). In fact, it is possible to implement privacy features into VMs, which I think is going to be a killer feature of our VM architecture. If someone is an expert at cryptography, and they have a great idea for a new VM, but they aren’t experts in creating a BFT consensus system, Avalanche is a great place for them to deploy their new ideas.
Q: Any plans to further upgrade consensus protocols?
A: We are constantly improving and extending our protocols. One of the features on our roadmap is implementing Frosty consensus, which is an extension of Snowman.
Q: Being someone who got into Blockchain space a few years back and observing multiple bubbles but no concrete adoption I sometimes lose my faith and I am sure there are many others like me. What can we expect from Avalanche to do things differently How do we get masses on board?
A: To me, education and usability have been the two biggest obstacles holding back real adoption for these networks. Fortunately, there’s been massive leaps on the education front (in 2014 it was hard to get anyone in my family to listen to me blabber about bitcoin and blockchains, but last Christmas it was all anyone wanted to talk about).
On the usability side, that includes everything from network congestion to the user experience on the front-end. Ideally, the next waves of users will be more seamlessly accessing dapps. Allowing them to be more focused on what they are trying to accomplish, and less on the “how” its possible in the backend (like how we don’t think of internet protocols when surfing the web — are people still saying surfing the web?)
Q: Avalanche integrated google to its wallet platform, how is this different from using a centralized wallet? Private keys are supposed to be without recovery
A: The Avalanche wallet supports using Google as a way to access your wallet. Using this functionality is very similar to having Google manage a centralized wallet. If someone isn’t comfortable with Google managing their wallet, they can use the Keystore files that they are able to store on the wallet.
Q: I’ve seen on Denali testnet that Africa was not represented. Is it a problem for you as Africans didn’t participate?
A: It’s funny, but we know for certain that representatives exist in the African continent. The issue here, I think, is that their IP addresses weren’t on mainland Africa for whatever reason. One of our most active community members made a map of nodes, and he himself was running nodes as a Nigerian. Check out his work here!
Q: How is the confidentiality of development ideas submitted for grant applications ensured? Like, how can we be sure that our plans and ideas aren’t shared and/or stolen?
A: Look, I’m not going to give anyone here business advice. I will say this, I started up a company several years ago and one of the early mistakes I made was being too tight-lipped about how things worked and why what was being offered was unique and novel. Keep a paper trail, if you submit a really novel idea, at least you have that paper trail to fall back on. But understand, we’re not in the business of making your ideas, and your grants are contingent on your ability to successfully deliver your milestones. Another thing: as someone on the grant committee, the team is even more important than the idea. A great idea with no team or an unqualified one will not get approved. So surround yourself with people who can deliver and be the person who can show up and work hard to make something in your head manifest into reality. Everything is execution, execution is everything.
Q: Why would DEFI dapps on Ethereum port to Avax rather than any of the other platforms?
A: Higher throughput, faster finality. No more waiting 14 seconds to see if things make it into the block and then another 6+ minutes to see if the transaction receives sufficient confirmation. We are immediately final and our block times are under 3 seconds: often under 1 second. Oh and the C-Chain itself runs at 200tps while Ethereum is 14tps.
Q: You raised $42million from your public sale. How sure that money invested on AVAX platform will be worth it in the long run? Why would investors hold on AVAX token for the long term?
A: Join AMAs like this one. Read and follow our twitter and medium pages. Listen to podcasts featuring the team. And above all, DYOR. I believe in our community’s ability to vet Avalanche well enough to see its long-term benefit, and based on the A1 vs B option sales, it looks like people understand that being involved in the success of this platform over the long-haul is a smart move for decentralization in-general.
Q: What can you say about the listing of your AVAX coins on CoinTiger and BigOne exchanges without even launching your mainnet released? Do you think this pre-listing will affect the actual liquidity of AVAX when the real AVAX coins started trading?
A: The only thing we have to say on these listings is that these are not official. There are currently zero AVAX tokens listed on exchanges but we will certainly announce them when we have updates. Thanks for asking this question so that we can clarify!
Q: Is Avalanche looking to involve Universities officially in its main net? Hackathon is a great pointer, but we need clarification.
A: Avalanche has continually progressed towards including all types of people including universities. We will share more information as they are available, but some possible activities include university ambassador programs, hackathons, seminars led by the Ava Labs team on campus, recruitment efforts, and more.
Q: How do you plan to incentivize the developers? People build on Ethereum because there was an insane amount of resources available for the developers. What’s our approach with this? Is there an incubation or grant program and the documentation to build on top of Ethereum?
A: There are a lot of ways to incentivize developers, and we’re already taking steps to do so. For one, we have Avalanche-X grants. This provides full support of Ava Labs and monetary resources for developers and projects. Likewise, we are looking to continue to improve testing and tooling on Avalanche. If the tools are robust on Avalanche, developers will have a better experience and will want to share that experience with close friends.
Q: How difficult it is for a solidity dev to switch their Dapp from Ethereum or Eos to Avalanche? What incentives do they have for doing it?
A: This is not difficult at all. The Contract Chain (C-Chain) already has the Ethereum VM running on it. Our focus is to improve interoperability with other chains. The incentive for doing so is a better experience overall: faster transaction speeds, lower fees, better performance overall.
Q: How will Avalanche prevent your Blockchain from getting a very big size? It’s a well-known problem for every decentralized Blockchain.
A: So the X-Chain and the P-Chain are both custom VMs written by our team. In those systems, we will be actively and aggressively pruning the state to keep up with state growth. The C-Chain is, unfortunately, going to suffer the same issues that Geth does in terms of state growth. We have our own custom WASM VM in the works which could make leaner/more pruneable smart contracts someday. Right now, though, the plan is aggressive pruning on the X-Chain and P-Chain.
A cool thing about our explorer is that it’s built on Kafka. This means it scales horizontally and provides petabyte-level of hash-linked verifiable storage of the accepted transaction stream. In essence, if you run our explorer backend, you’re running an archival node that scales with the data growth and has full replay capability. Check out that repo here and mad props to @tcrypt for his work on that: https://github.com/ava-labs/ortelius
Q: What can you say about the investment of Ethereum Genesis on AVAX sales? Does it mean Vitalik favors your project? Some say AVAX could beat the ETH 2.0? Any comment with that?
A: For many people within the community — myself included — consider support from an early Ethereum adopter to be a validation of the technology, team, and vision behind Avalanche. I wouldn’t say that implies any connection to Vitalik, however.
Q: Avalanche is the first project for a long time, who was not afraid to conduct a sale in the ICO format. Tell me, have you considered other options, why did you choose this format?
A: Not entirely sure what other formats there are, but the token sale format that we pursued was the best for us.
Q: The DeFi market is quite large and has several solutions that aim to replace old solutions in the traditional financial market. Does AVAX intend to exploit these niche markets, being a new competitor, or will it focus its efforts on providing a scalable, fast and secure architecture for the interoperability of the various existing or future DeFi solutions?
A: We want as many DeFi projects to build on Avalanche as possible, so I guess the answer to this is both! Avalanche was built with financial applications in mind so there’s really no reason to limit the usage of the platform to just one or the other.
Q: The traditional asset market is highly regulated, bringing the necessary security that different actors need to interact in this giant market. And that regulation also comes from the centralized presence of governments. The crypto market, on the other hand, is known to be decentralized and unregulated. How can DeFi solutions convince investors that they are safe enough to guarantee the necessary solvency and liquidity, even without strong regulations and centralized authorities that control and supervise the market? Can AVAX, located in the heart of the financial market, benefit from this position, and create a network of influence capable of leveraging DeFi solutions?
A: Bridging CeFi and DeFi is a mission close to our hearts. I come from a traditional finance background and that’s certainly something that I will use to bring CeFi to Avalanche as well as do my part to help DeFi keep growing in a sustainable and healthy way for the entire market. One of the best ways that any DeFi solution can make investors feel safe is by adopting a policy of transparency. We saw risky, black-box financial products in CeFi cause financial collapse in 2008 — transparency is one of the best ways to enable investors to make educated decisions.
Q: We have been reading several variations of POS approval mechanisms instead of PoW on next-generation blockchain networks for several years. But you’re proposing an entirely new approach and saying, “PoS is not a consensus mechanism!” While nearly all projects announced PoS consensus models, the Avalanche consensus dropped like a bombshell into the blockchain field. Can you explain this confusion on behalf of many of my friends?
A: I think the main confusion stems from PoW being used as both a Sybil control mechanism and as a Consensus mechanism. At the end of the day, neither of these terms (PoW or PoS) actually describes a consensus mechanism. PoW implies that a node is able to prove that it put in a certain amount of attempts hashing on an object. PoS implies that a node has locked up some amount of stake. PoW can be used for DoS protection, without being used as consensus. Similarly, PoS can be used for the same purpose. This is primarily solving the Sybil problem. However, these processes don’t really explain the full consensus process. In Bitcoin, Nakamoto consensus is used to “follow the longest chain”. Where new blocks are added slowly, using PoW to avoid a Sybil attack. Early PoS models also used Nakamoto consensus by using VRFs. But in reality, Sybil control is a separate problem from consensus. The Avalanche platform doesn’t use Nakamoto consensus, it uses Avalanche consensus. To protect against Sybil attacks, it utilizes PoS.
Q: What is the expected TPS for the C chain. As I see, the white paper talks about Crypto transfers only.
A: ~200tps but the limiting factor is Geth and the EVM. We can improve this.
Q: Does covid19 situation such lockdown affects the pacing of AVAX development?
A: The situation really has no effect on the Ava Labs team and the development of Avalanche. As most of you probably know, the blockchain industry has been fairly forward with remote-friendly work. Since we’ve already been accustomed to remote work, the transition was very easy for us. Although many of us New Yorkers are patiently waiting for the day this all returns back to normal :)
Q: How will you integrate blockchain software designed in very different software languages into the Avalanche / AVAX network?
A: We currently have the ability to run VMs in separate processes over a gRPC server. This enables multiple languages to be used when implementing VMs.
*Questions and answers may have been edited from original submission for grammar and clarity
About Avalanche
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 powerful, reliable, and secure applications and custom blockchain networks with complex rulesets or build on existing private or public subnets.
Website | Whitepapers | Twitter | Discord | GitHub | Documentation | Explorer | Avalanche-X | Telegram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | YouTube
About Ava Labs:
Ava Labs makes it simple to launch finance applications using blockchain technology–with highly scalable and efficient networks, customizable public and private blockchains, the capability to create any digital asset, and more. We are empowering people to build an open, simple, and democratic internet of finance.
Website | Whitepapers | Twitter | Discord | GitHub | Documentation | Explorer | Avalanche-X | Telegram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | YouTube
