Avalanche wants to digitize all the world’s assets on the blockchain

Image credit: Avalanche

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

For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn the interview Emin Gun Sirerfounder and CEO of Ava Labs.

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

Ava Labs created the layer-1 blockchain Avalanche, a platform that allows developers to build multi-functional blockchains and decentralized applications with a focus on speed and low transaction costs. The blockchain is compatible with Solidity, a language developers use to code, allowing them to build projects that can communicate across multiple networks. Hundreds of projects are part of the Avalanche ecosystem, ranging from decentralized exchanges like 1-inch to security companies like BitGo.

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

The present and future of L1s

The company sees its underlying technology as a key driver of developer attention. “Looking around, I decided we needed to come up with our own architecture for scaling that no one else seems to be pushing at the moment,” 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 link was the origin of what I thought was a completely new approach,” added Gün Sirer.

Since then, Ava Labs has had one main focus. “The North Star for us is to digitize all the world’s assets on the Avalanche blockchain,” said Gün Sirer. “That’s what we set out to do, and that’s what I’m so excited about.”

Over the past few years, a number of L1 blockchains have emerged across the crypto ecosystem, but Gün Sirer believes that in three to five years, the abundance of L1 blockchains will “be played out.”

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

So what does it take to make a good L1?

It must be decentralized, secure and fast, noted Gün Sirer. “I think we’re in a good place and I think people are going to rally,” 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 broken
• US regulatory crackdown on crypto
• Ava Labs’ growth in Asian markets
• Blockchain’s partnership and business development
• Ava Labs’ focus for 2023 and beyond

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

Chain Reaction comes out every other Thursday at 12pm PT, so be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite pod platform to stay up to date on the latest in web3 and crypto.