Welcome to Chain Reaction. This is a podcast where we interview cryptocurrency newsmakers to better understand the technology behind the hype and those working to build a decentralized future.
For this week’s episode, Jacqueline interviewed Emin Gunsilerfounder and CEO of Ava Labs.
In total, Ava Labs has raised about $640 million, according to Crunchbase, and is backed by companies like a16z and Polychain Capital. In recent months, Ava Labs has announced a number of partnerships with leading brands and companies, including Amazon Web Services, which was exclusively covered by TechCrunch.
Ava Labs created a layer 1 blockchain Avalanche. It is a platform that enables developers to build feature-rich blockchain and decentralized applications with a focus on speed and low transaction costs. Blockchain is compatible with Solidity, the language developers use to code, allowing them to build projects that can communicate across multiple networks. Hundreds of projects are part of his Avalanche ecosystem, from decentralized exchanges like 1inch to digital asset security companies like BitGo.
When it comes to Total Value Locked (TVL), Avalanche is currently the 7th largest blockchain with more than $1.1 billion secured at a market cap of $5.72 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.
L1 present and future
The company believes its underlying technology is a key factor in attracting developers’ attention. “We looked around and decided that we needed to come up with our own architecture for scaling that no one seems to be pushing at the moment,” he said.
Thus was born the ‘marriage’ between Avalanche’s consensus and its subnetting architecture. This allows you to have multiple parallel chains dedicated to your own use case. “This coupling was the origin of what I thought was a completely new approach,” added Gün Sirer.
Since then, Ava Labs has had one big focus. “The north star for us is Avalanche digitizing all assets in the world with his blockchain,” Gunschiler said. “That’s what we’re trying to do and that’s what I’m very excited about.”
While a number of L1 blockchains have emerged across the cryptocurrency ecosystem in recent years, Gün Schiller believes the abundance of L1 blockchains will “run out” three to five years from now.
“I think we already have too many L1s. They are essentially copying other people’s playbooks,” says Gün Sirer. “A lot of the time they’re bringing something to the market that the market doesn’t want.”
So what does it take to make a good L1?
It must be decentralized, secure and fast, says Gün Sirer. “I think we are in a good place and I think people will converge,” he added.
We also talked about Gün Sirer’s background, why he launched Avalanche, a layer 1 blockchain in 2020, whether there is too much L1 in the space, and how to scale blockchains more efficiently. .
Then we discussed:
- How layer 2 vision is broken
- US Regulatory Crackdown on Cryptos
- Ava Labs Growth in Asian Market
- Blockchain partnership and business development
- Ava Labs 2023 and Beyond Focus
Articles mentioned during the episode can be found here and here.
Chain Reaction will be published every other Thursday at 12:00 PM PT. Stay up to date on web3 and crypto by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform.
