Skip to main content

What Is Avalanche?

Avalanche is an open-source platform for building decentralized applications in one interoperable, decentralized, and highly scalable ecosystem. Powered by a uniquely powerful consensus mechanism, Avalanche is the first ecosystem designed to accommodate the scale of global finance, with near-instant transaction finality.

Why Choose Avalanche?​

Blazingly Fast​

  • Avalanche employs the fastest consensus mechanism of any layer 1 blockchain. The unique consensus mechanism enables quick finality and low latency: in less than 2 seconds, your transaction is effectively processed and verified.

Built to Scale​

  • Developers who build on Avalanche can build application-specific blockchains with complex rulesets or build on existing private or public Subnets in any language.
  • Avalanche is incredibly energy-efficient and can run easily on consumer-grade hardware. The entire Avalanche network consumes the same amount of energy as 46 US households, equivalent to 0.0005% of the amount of energy consumed by Bitcoin.
  • Solidity developers can build on Avalanche's implementation of the EVM straight out-of-the box, or build their own custom Virtual Machine (VM) for advanced use cases.

Advanced Security​

  • Avalanche consensus scales to thousands of concurrent validators without suffering performance degradation making it one of the most secure protocols for internet scaling systems.
  • Permissionless and permissioned custom blockchains deployed as an Avalanche Subnets can include custom rulesets designed to be compliant with legal and jurisdictional considerations.