Podcast Notes | Interview with Avalanche Founder: Unique Consensus Mechanism Remains an Advantage, and Technological Innovation Creates Real-World Value
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Podcast Notes | Interview with Avalanche Founder: Unique Consensus Mechanism Remains an Advantage, and Technological Innovation Creates Real-World Value
In distributed systems, consensus is critical, ensuring that all nodes in the system can agree on a particular state or value.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsCompiled & Edited: TechFlow
Emin Gün Sirer is the founder of Avalanche, commonly known as "Professor Gun."
In this podcast episode, Emin provides a detailed explanation of Avalanche's multi-chain architecture, consensus algorithm, and virtual machine design, emphasizing its flexibility and scalability. He predicts that in the future there will be millions of blockchains or subnets, each with specific purposes and rules.
At a time when Star Arena is gaining popularity and Avalanche craves attention and momentum, what technical advantages does it offer compared to Layer 2 solutions? Has it successfully attracted more users and applications? And where should Avalanche go from here? Let’s explore the founder’s insights and reflections.
Host: Logan Jastremski
Guest: Emin Gün Sirer, Founder of Avalanche Protocol
Program: Logan Jastremski Podcast
Original Title: “Avalanche Founder Emin Gün Sirer on Asia Market & The End State of Millions of Blockchains”
Episode Link: Link
Air Date: October 7
Outlook and Belief in the Future of Blockchain Technology
-
Emin believes blockchain technology will no longer be a single, centralized entity or platform. To support diverse applications and business needs, blockchain must be flexible and adaptable to different scenarios. Emin envisions millions of blockchains or subnets in the future. To realize this vision, he and his team designed the Avalanche consensus protocol.
-
The Avalanche consensus protocol is an innovative mechanism distinct from existing PoW (Proof-of-Work) and PoS (Proof-of-Stake). It offers a more efficient and scalable solution capable of handling massive transaction volumes with high throughput and low latency—meeting the demands of a future with millions of blockchains or subnets.
-
The Avalanche protocol prioritizes security, ensuring the network resists various attacks while maintaining data integrity and safety.
Asia’s Blockchain Market: A Strong Demand for Tokenization, More Active and Open
-
Clear Regulatory Environment: Emin’s experiences in Singapore and Hong Kong have shown him the strength and vibrancy of Asia’s market. Unlike the U.S., Asian countries offer clearer and more favorable regulatory frameworks for blockchain and cryptocurrency. Governments and regulators provide clear guidance and support for blockchain innovation, fostering growth and prosperity in the regional ecosystem.
-
Strong Demand for Tokenization: Emin observes significant demand for tokenization across Asian markets. Major corporations are actively exploring blockchain and tokenization to drive innovation and improve efficiency. This activity reflects the region’s openness and positive attitude toward new technologies.
-
Emin cites Avalanche’s collaboration with SK Planet in South Korea as evidence of strong regional adoption. SK Planet, a major company with a large user base, tokenized its loyalty points using Avalanche, enabling users to manage and use their points more conveniently and securely. This project attracted approximately 35 million Korean users.
-
The success of this initiative reflects trust and acceptance of blockchain technology among Asian consumers and enterprises. Compared to the U.S. market, Asia is significantly more active and open in blockchain and tokenization.
Evolution of Blockchain Technology: From Hype to Maturity
-
Emin notes that past blockchain technology was filled with jargon and grand promises—often empty, lacking actual execution and delivery. He attributes this to technological immaturity and excessive market hype.
-
Over time, the market and users have grown tired of these hollow promises and futuristic fantasies. They now seek blockchain technologies and solutions with real-world applications and tangible value. Emin believes blockchain is maturing—future systems will emphasize practicality, reliability, and security over empty claims and speculative visions.
-
Emin predicts few new blockchains will emerge in the future. The market will consolidate around platforms that have proven their value and reliability. Users and investors will become more rational, focusing on real utility rather than unrealistic promises. The true value of technology lies in the concrete benefits it delivers to users and businesses.
-
Emin points out significant differences among blockchain communities in terms of development speed and delivery capability. Some communities rapidly deliver innovative and practical technologies, while others lag behind. He believes a focused, innovative, and goal-oriented community is more likely to produce valuable results quickly.
-
Emin emphasizes that technological innovation is the key driver of blockchain advancement. Only through continuous innovation can blockchain meet growing market demands and challenges.
-
Emin highlights how Avalanche innovates by solving the most difficult problem—consensus protocols. He considers consensus the core of blockchain technology, and overcoming this challenge is essential for progress. Avalanche brings a fresh perspective and methodology to distributed systems, enabling the development of more efficient and reliable blockchain technology.
Problems with Layer 2 Solutions
-
Emin argues that when communities and developers face difficulties improving their Layer 1 blockchains, they often turn to Layer 2 solutions. He views Layer 2 as a temporary fix—not a long-term or fundamental solution.
-
Layer 2 solutions face the same issues and challenges as Layer 1. While they may offer short-term relief, they don’t address root problems. The market needs time to recognize the limitations of Layer 2, though engineers and developers typically realize this earlier, as they directly confront these technical hurdles.
-
Emin illustrates this with examples like Polygon, which experiences daily “reversions”—chain reorganizations or rollbacks of blockchain state. Due to such reversions, Polygon fails to achieve blockchain’s foundational value: finality. Emin argues that if a blockchain keeps moving backward instead of forward, users cannot trust or rely on it. Trust in blockchain fundamentally depends on immutability and reliability.
TechFlow Note: Finality is a core feature of blockchain technology, meaning that once a transaction is confirmed, it cannot be altered or reversed.
Everything About the Avalanche Consensus Algorithm
-
Emin explains the background of consensus problems in distributed systems. Consensus is crucial—it ensures all nodes agree on a system state or value. Over the past 60 years, only three major consensus approaches have emerged: Proof of Work (PoW), Classical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), and the new method introduced by Avalanche.
-
Emin outlines the limitations of classical BFT protocols, particularly under heavy communication and signature verification requirements. These protocols require extensive message exchanges and computational resources, making them unsustainable at scale. As a result, they face serious challenges in efficiency and scalability, limiting their use in large, complex distributed systems.
-
Emin emphasizes that Avalanche addresses these issues with a completely new consensus approach, designed to overcome classical BFT limitations and deliver higher efficiency and scalability. Avalanche reduces communication and computational overhead, enabling fast, reliable consensus in large-scale networks.
-
Emin stresses that Avalanche optimizes consensus by reducing communication overhead. In many traditional algorithms, communication is a major bottleneck, constraining performance and scalability. By minimizing node-to-node communication, Avalanche becomes more efficient and scalable. Additionally, Avalanche achieves probabilistic finality, enabling faster transaction confirmation and improved user experience.
-
Emin believes Avalanche can support more validators because its consensus doesn't rely on all-to-all communication. This reduction in communication overhead allows greater validator participation, supporting larger networks without sacrificing performance or increasing latency.
-
In Avalanche, nodes do not need to communicate with every other node, drastically reducing communication complexity and cost. This design enhances efficiency and scalability, allowing Avalanche to operate effectively in large, complex environments.
-
Emin expresses his desire for everyone capable of running a node to participate in Avalanche. He believes the strength of such systems depends on full decentralization and global representation in the consensus process.
-
Avalanche’s consensus does not rely on all-to-all communication but uses repeated subsampling voting. Each node randomly queries a few others, who in turn query more nodes—iteratively achieving network-wide agreement.
-
Because each node communicates with only a small number of peers, Avalanche processes transactions extremely quickly. Emin notes that transactions on Avalanche settle in about 700 milliseconds, far faster than other systems.
-
Emin believes Solana also relies on All-to-All communication, which imposes scalability limits, whereas Avalanche has completely eliminated this constraint.
TechFlow Note: "All-to-All" communication refers to a model where each node must communicate with every other node.
-
Emin distinguishes between information propagation and consensus. Information propagation involves broadcasting block content to all nodes, while consensus means agreeing on that content. Avalanche achieves rapid consensus while ensuring fair and fast information dissemination. Its information propagation protocol is the fastest in the world.
-
Emin expresses surprise at the rapid growth and widespread global adoption of the Avalanche community. The active developer community, diverse range of applications and projects, and Avalanche’s global impact have exceeded his expectations—demonstrating its strong potential and significance in the blockchain space.
Common Misconceptions About Avalanche
At the end of the podcast, Emin summarizes several common misconceptions about Avalanche:
-
Competitive Relationship with Other Blockchains: Avalanche’s main competitors are Wall Street and traditional financial systems—not blockchains like Ethereum.
-
Ecosystem Goal: Avalanche aims to tokenize real-world assets, transforming and optimizing traditional finance.
-
Misunderstanding of Multi-Chain Architecture: Avalanche is a multi-chain system where each chain can have its own rules, operating independently without being affected by the load of other chains.
-
Relationship with Ethereum: Emin denies that Avalanche competes with Ethereum. He believes Avalanche’s architecture can encompass other systems, including Ethereum. He foresees many existing Layer 1 blockchains eventually becoming subnets within Avalanche.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
深潮TechFlow
