X-Chain (X-CHAIN) news

Introduction to Avalanche (AVAX)

Born in September 2021 at the height of a bull market, Avalanche (AVAX) boasts itself as an eco-friendly, low-cost, and fast-paced blockchain of the future. Does it live up to its words? Let's find out. What is Avalanche? Blockchain advocates (sometimes blindly) claim that blockchain will bring about revolution, especially a financial one. While blockchain and cryptocurrency have achieved certain milestones and recognition in the public eyes, the route to mass adoption and total replacement of traditional means is still rocky. The main challenges of blockchain that skeptics often mention include the fiendish energy-consumption, counterintuitive complicated processes, lack of investor protection, and good old fear of the unknown. After more than a decade of hard work of developers from all over the world, these remain major obstacles for the technology. In 2020, a group of developers took advantage of the Proof-of-Stake (POS) mechanism to come up with a new blockchain called Avalanche. POS is widely known to consume much less energy than their predecessor, Proof-of-Work (POW), because the former relies on voting to update data on the blockchain while the latter depends on the computing arms race among validators. Besides, POW is notoriously complex and hard to scale up, which makes it susceptible to network delays and congestion when the number of users and transactions increase. In fact, this happened to Ethereum in the bull market of 2020-2021; a transaction could take hundreds of USD of fee and days of waiting, but it might not go through despite all the hassles. In contrast to the disadvantages of POW, POS enables Avalanche to have incredible speed and scalability. Avalanche claims on their website to be "the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality, and has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol". And they even have the numbers to prove it. What does Avalanche do? According to the Avalanche Platform Whitepaper, Avalanche's goal is to provide the necessary tools and platforms for developers to build and run (1) application-specific blockchains (both private and public blockchains) (2) highly scalable dapps. (3) complex smart contracts and smart assets Avalanche has three built-in blockchains: - Exchange Chain (X-Chain) is where digital assets are created and traded. - Platform Chain (P-Chain) is where the numerous subnets of Avalanche are created and validators are coordinated. People can also build custom blockchains on the P-Chain. - Contract Chain (C-Chain) is where all smart contracts are built and maintained. These three chains are validated and secured by the Primary Network, a special subnet within the Avalanche blockchain. With the clear designation of tasks among three blockchains, it can clearly be seen why and how Avalanche can deliver such a superb transaction speed with low fee compared to other blockchains. Furthermore, this design enables Avalanche to work in an efficient manner without consuming too much energy like other blockchains. Created by a group of well-known blockchain experts and professors, Avalanche has attracted a huge amount of attention and capitals from big institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz, Mastercard, etc. The data from Defi Llama shows that the total value locked in Avalanche at the moment is $2.65 billion, ranking fourth in all blockchains. Considering Avalanche was only released two years ago, this number is very convincing of its potentials. AVAX AVAX is the native token of the Avalanche blockchain. To do anything on Avalanche, you need AVAX. One special thing about AVAX is that the AVAX collected as transaction fee is burned 100%, making AVAX rarer by seconds. Those with more than 2000 AVAX tokens can join as a validator and earn up to 11% APY in AVAX. AVAX Tokenomics can be seen below: Staking Rewards: 50%. Public Sale: 10%. Team: 10%. Foundation: 9.26%. Community and Dev Endowment: 7%. Strategic Partners: 5%. Private Sale: 3.46%. Seed Sale: 2.5%.. Airdrop: 2.5%. Testnet Incentive Program: 0.28%. The total capped supply of AVAX is 720 million and half of them, which is 360 million AVAX tokens, were released at the genesis block. The remaining is being emitted according to a set formula in the Avalanche whitepaper, and the emission rate can be changed to adapt to different economic conditions. The current token holders will vote on the new emission rate if there is one. Today, there are more than 404 million AVAX tokens in circulation. AVAX was sold during Avalanche's ICO in 2020 at the price of $0.5 each. As of now (July 2022), AVAX is traded on Bitget at the price of $17.69, a 35.4 times increase from ICO price. How to buy AVAX The easiest way to buy AVAX is to purchase it via an exchange that allows credit cards like Bitget. You can spot trade AVAX/USDT or AVAX/USDC right now on Bitget. For more advanced traders, you can trade AVAX futures here. Disclaimer: All products and projects listed in this article are not endorsements and are provided for informational purposes only. Follow Bitget Academy for more insights: Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram

What Are The Different Types Of Public Blockchain?

There are thousands of different live blockchains out there; what makes them different? Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, all these big blockchains we know and love are what we call public blockchains. Public blockchains are usually permissionless, decentralized, and use unique consensus mechanics to ensure the security of the data. However, most of them had their specialty to differentiate themselves from the rest. Bitcoin The Bitcoin blockchain is known as the OG blockchain, which is an immutable transaction record ledger. Bitcoin was invented by an unknown entity called Satoshi Nakamoto, designed to be the first practical blockchain and prove the possibility of digital money. Nowadays, $BTC, the coin native to the bitcoin blockchain, is considered a store of value by the crypto community. Ethereum Ethereum, second only to Bitcoin in market cap, is famous for its smart contract functionality. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum is more than just a digital money transaction ledger; smart contracts made Ethereum a virtual computer; hence it was called “Ethereum Virtual Machine” (EVM). Aside from the coin native to Ethereum, Ether ( $ETH), the EVM had a token standard called ERC-20, which allows developers to create a token within a smart contract compatible with EVM. Examples of some popular ERC-20 tokens are blockchain Oracle, Chainlink ($LINK); USD-pegged stable coin, Tether (USDT); the DAO token of MakerDAO, Maker ($MKR), etc. Many Dapp, Defi, and DAO also reside in the Ethereum ecosystem. However, as the network expands, the Ethereum network suffers from developer growth decrease due to high-gas fees. To stay in the game, Ethereum.org planned to implement ETH 2.0 by 2022, introducing multiple mechanisms to the Ethereum network. Solana Ethereum’s scalability problem is prominent to the crypto community. Naturally, the community would look for alternative solutions to this problem, one of which is Solana, developed by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former lead architect in Qualcomm. Solana is a layer one blockchain that utilizes Proof-of-History, a variant of Proof-of-Stake, to increase the Transaction per second of the Solana blockchain. To give you a perspective, Bitcoin’s TPS is 7; Ethereum’s TPS is around 15-20; Solana’s TPS could be as high as a wrapping 65,000 transactions per second. Solana is so affordable compared to Ethereum, hence drawing a lot of traction in 2021. One thing worth mentioning is that the Solana ecosystem is relatively isolated from the rest as Solana’s native projects are not compatible with other blockchains such as Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, etc. Avalanche While also known as one of the “Ethereum killers” like Solana, Avalanche does not isolate itself from other blockchain networks. Instead, Avalanche prides itself on transaction speed, low costs, eco-friendliness, and inclusivity with other blockchain networks such as Ethereum. Unlike Solana that uses PoH in hopes of resolving the scalability problem, Avalanche divided its primary network into three separate chains: P-chain for data validation and storage; X-chain for asset creation and exchange; and C-chain for smart contracts. Each chain could interoperate with each others. Moreover, Avalanche used DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) as the consensus mechanism, massively increasing the network throughput with subsampling and transitive voting, making Avalanche one of the most prominent public blockchain in the crypto space. Polygon Before we cover the Polygon network, let’s take a into the concept of layer 1 and layer 2 blockchain. The blockchains we’ve covered so far were all layer 1 blockchains, meaning they are building as a foundation of their own. So we could see a pattern here: every new layer 1 blockchain is trying to solve the existing problem. However, that is not the only way to solve the scalability problem of blockchain. They had also come up with layer 2 solutions, such as Plasma to Ethereum and Lightning to Bitcoin, which basically is a protocol that is built on top of a layer 1 blockchain. The changes made in layer 2 would not affect the mainchain (layer 1), which is why some might call layer 2 protocols “off-chain” solutions. Coming back to Polygon, formerly known as MATIC, is an Ethereum scaling solution. The polygon network was created to offload the over capacitated Ethereum network using layer 2 solutions (Plasma chain) and side chains (MATIC PoS sidechain). Until now, the Polygon network is still considered as one of the, if not only, widely accepted Ethereum scaling solutions. Binance Smart Chain Binance smart chain is the blockchain network launched by the centralized crypto exchange platform Binance. The Binance smart chain is basically a modified fork from Ethereum, is in other words, it is almost a replica of the Ethereum blockchain. With cheaper fees and faster transactions, one would think that it should dominate the market. However, platform-based blockchain such as Binance smart chain is relatively centralized as there are fewer active nodes in the network at any given time. That is also why BSC could achieve a higher TPS and cheaper fees. In summary, we had introduced some popular public blockchains and various ideas like layer 2, forking, etc. However, what we had covered here is by no means the whole truth of what public blockchain is.