Avalanche wants to digitize all assets in the world on the blockchain

Welcome to Chain Reaction, a podcast that interviews crypto journalists to better understand the technology behind the hype and the people working to build a decentralized future.

For this week’s episode, Jacqueline interviewed Emin Gun Sirerthe founder and CEO of Ava Labs.

Ava Labs has raised a total of around $640 million, according to Crunchbase, and is backed by companies like a16z and Polychain Capital. In recent months, Ava Labs announced a number of partnerships with big brands and companies, like Amazon Web Services, which TechCrunch covered exclusively.

Ava Labs created the Avalanche Layer 1 blockchain, a platform that enables developers to build multifunctional blockchains and decentralized applications with a focus on speed and low transaction costs. The blockchain is compatible with Solidity, a language used by developers to code, and allows them to create projects that can communicate on several networks. Hundreds of projects are part of the Avalanche ecosystem, ranging from decentralized exchanges like 1inch to digital asset security companies like BitGo.

In terms of total value locked (TVL), Avalanche is currently the seventh largest blockchain, with over $1.1 billion secured on a market capitalization of $5.72 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

The present and the future of the L1s

The company sees its underlying technology as a key factor in attracting developer attention. “Looking around, I decided that we need to come up with our own scaling architecture that no one else seems to be pushing yet,” Gün Sirer said.

Thus, a “marriage” of Avalanche’s consensus with its subnet architecture, which allows us to have multiple parallel chains dedicated to their own use cases, was born. “This coupling was the genesis of what I thought was a whole new approach,” added Gün Sirer.

Since then, Ava Labs has focused on one major goal. “The north star for us is to digitize all assets in the world on the Avalanche blockchain,” said Gün Sirer. “That’s what we set out to do and that’s what excites me the most.”

In recent years, a number of L1 blockchains have appeared in the crypto ecosystem, but Gün Sirer believes that in three to five years, the abundance of L1 blockchains “will be exhausted”.

“I think we already have way too many L1s and they are basically copying other people’s manuals,” Gün Sirer said. “In many cases, they bring something to market that the market hasn’t asked for.”

So what does it take to make a good L1?

It should be decentralized, secure and fast, noted Gün Sirer. “I think we’re in a good place and I think people will converge,” he added.

We also talked about Gün Sirer’s background, why he launched the layer 1 blockchain, Avalanche, in 2020, whether the space has too many L1s, and how blockchains can scale more efficiently.

And we discussed:

• How Layer 2 Vision is Shattered
• US Regulatory Crackdown on Crypto
• Growth of Ava Labs in Asian markets
• Blockchain partnerships and business development
• Ava Labs Focal Point for 2023 and Beyond

Articles mentioned during the episode can be found here and here.

Chain Reaction comes out every other Thursday at 12:00 PM PT, so be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest Web3 and crypto news.