Unveiling Everest: Avalanche’s Mainnet Release Candidate

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Avalanche

3 min readAug 21, 2020

Today, we’re excited to share the Avalanche Mainnet release candidate: Everest–a fully-featured version of the Avalanche network that will act as the final phase of testing before the launch of Avalanche’s mainnet.

This marks a key step for our project and community as Everest has all of the core features of Avalanche. Please note that Everest does not reflect the state of the mainnet release that will follow soon after. This means Everest will not show token balances for the Avalanche Token (AVAX) sale participants, grant recipients, or testnet rewards (more information to come later this week).

In addition to substantial security and performance improvements, the following features are now incorporated for users to test and use:

Enhanced smart contract utility: Upgraded Avalanche Virtual Machine to support AVAX asset movement between all chains on the default subnet, including transfers between Avalanche’s default asset chain (X-Chain) and its Ethereum Virtual Machine implementation (C-Chain).
Non-fungible token (NFT) support: Full support for the creation, transacting, and wallet custody for NFTs.
Networking updates: Introduced adaptive timeouts to learn current network delays, enabling liveness during periods of larger delays, and enhanced DDoS protection to improve both network resilience and bootstrapping time.
Bech32 addresses: Implements Bech32 address format for more easily read formatting and to reduce the possibility of user errors.
Fees: Implements fees for transactions and activity across the network.
UTXOs for Platform Chain: Converted from account-based model to UTXO-based model to enable pruning functionality.
End-to-end testing & network monitoring: Added support for end-to-end testing suite, and additional metrics for database and network monitoring.
Memos: Introducing a memo field for transactions, to ensure they are sent to the right account within shared wallets like those used by custodians and exchanges to receive user funds.

More details on the release are available on our Github.

With all of the exciting improvements being rolled out with Everest, developers currently building decentralized solutions, on networks such as Ethereum, will be able to enjoy these new improvements without needing to learn additional coding languages or change much of their current workflow.

Avalanche’s C-Chain is compatible with all of the key Ethereum tooling that has fueled decentralized finance’s (DeFi’s) growth to-date, including MetaMask, Web3.js, Remix, Truffle Suite, and Embark Platform. So current Ethereum applications can easily try Avalanche–Solidity works out of the box!

“Everest showcases the best of Avalanche, and marks the next step toward a new era of decentralized finance defined by velocity, efficient use of capital, and innovation in new products and services for people around the world,” — Kevin Sekniqi of Ava Labs.

To join Everest, please follow Ava Labs Senior Test Engineer Gabriel Cardona’s tutorial “How to Join Avalanche-Everest Release”:

Installing and running Avalanche
Creating users and addresses
Acquiring test tokens from the Avalanche faucet
Staking on Avalanche
Becoming a Validator on Avalanche

We plan on running Everest for a short time before formalizing and launching Avalanche with a genesis state that distributes AVAX to rightful owners. We’re excited to be one step closer toward the Avalanche mainnet launch officially marking the beginning of a new path forward for a decentralized future.

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.

Unveiling Everest: Avalanche’s Mainnet Release Candidate

About Avalanche

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