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AVA Labs' Avalanche Protocol targeting improved financial services
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AVA Labs' Avalanche Protocol targeting improved financial services

News Desk
News Desk
January 31st, 2023
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As blockchain technologies and cryptocurrenciesenter a more mature stage of development, the time has come to move away fromthe “winner takes most”, philosophy where a dominant company tires to emerge inthe space. Recognize that, while attrition is beginning to occur, severalcompanies, each with their own unique solutions, are likely to remain.

With that in mind there is opportunity for platforms who have recognized this and are planning for it, platforms like AVA Labs. Cofounded by blockchain guru and Cornell professor Emin Gün Sirer and software engineer Kevin Sekniqi, AVA Labs aims to develop a “platform of platforms” for blockchain applications that challenges Ethereum and the other market leaders.

Most blockchain industryparticipants I speak with tend to fall into one of two camps. Some recalledtaking a while to warm to blockchain technology. Once they studied it, theybecame increasingly excited. Others immediately knew it was something special.

Mr. Sekniqi places himself in a third camp, where he saw blockchain’s potential but maintained a healthy level of scepticism. While he believed blockchain technology was a fantastic idea, among its problems in its original form were the lack of clear uses cases, especially in finance. Since then advances in technology have addressed those issues, enough that Mr. Sekniqi and Mr. Sirer began developing their own solutions. The results were promising enough that AVA Labs was spun into a company in February, soon to attract funding from Andreesen Horowitz, A16Z, Polychain, Metastable, Initialized, Abstract Ventures, Naval Ravikant, and Balaji Srinivasan.

“We’ll release our public testnetsoon and then expand as much as we possibly can,” Mr. Sekniqi said. “We’re reinventing the tech stack and how consensus protocolsare built.”

Kevin Sekniqi

AVA Labs’ work establishes a brand new consensus protocol called Avalanche, Mr. Sekniqi explained. With Nakamoto Consensus the longest chain is the most valid. Then there is the classical voting structure. Avalanche protocol mixes the best of both; it provides high throughput and scalability while offering the security required for decentralized systems.

What is most uniqueabout the Avalanche protocol is it allows nodes across the system to utilizedifferent scripting languages. That in turn makes true decentralizationpossible, Mr. Sekniqi explained. In many cases, when only one scriptinglanguage is used it limits the possible number of validators available toparticipate. That increases the chances of system manipulation.

“Now we can globallydistribute validators across jurisdictions,” Mr. Sekniqi said.

By linking differentscripting languages, AVA Labs is acknowledging the natural, that there is morethan one strong solution in the marketplace. Different participants will havetheir own preference, so by developing techniques where all of those systemscan be in play there is complete inclusion.

Now we have clearapplicability to financial services, where transactions need to occur acrossjurisdictions. Before Avalanche Mr. Sekniqi worked in deep cryptography withfully homorphic encryption, a process allowing for computation on ciphertexts.Those calculations produce encrypted results which, when decrypted, matches theresults that would have been achieved had they been completed on plaintext.

It allows financial institutions to deploy and compute sensitive data on servers and ensures data is kept within jurisdictional boundaries.

“This is a legalproblem too,” Mr. Sekniqi said.

I asked about the applicability of zero knowledge proofs, and while Mr. Sekniqi said he is impressed by the technology he does not believe it is necessarily the correct approach. Something more pragmatic is required to address the level of regulation financial institutions operate under and the network privacy they must maintain. Fully homorphic encryption does just that while keeping data on private chains.

AVA Labs takes a morepractical approach to the blockchain space than many projects led by academicsdo, Mr. Sekniqi acknowledged. Many startups developed by college students andtechnicians have wonderful ideas and creative technologies, but they are oftennot based in the current technological reality where they avail themselves ofsolutions that already exist that can solve problems that also exist. Too manystartups offer a solution in search of a problem.

“Beyond the platform itself,as a team we looked at the general trend of where the space is going first andthen we built out the tech stack for that reality,” Mr. Sekniqi said.

That philosophy had AVA Labs targeting real needs of the financial industry from the beginning, and that approach is yielding fruit, he added.

“To address the use caseslike live trading you need the right platform but one that is rooted inpragmatism. That is what we are building as a team.

“We have the abilityto truly scale to thousands of nodes, with the same TPS (transactions persecond) as classical protocols in a truly decentralized platform.”

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