Key Takeaways from Avalanche Q2 2023 State of the Ecosystem Call

On April 12th, 2023, The Tie hosted a call with Joshua Frank (The Tie CEO), Morgan Krupetsky (Director of Business Development: Institutions and Capital Markets at Ava Labs), and Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo (Head of DeFi at Ava Labs) to discuss the Avalanche blockchain network and its use cases, partnerships, and platform updates. Below we’ve recapped the highlights and key talking points from the call.

The call focused on the following topics:
1. Institutional adoption of cryptocurrency technology amidst a changing regulatory environment
2. DeFi and NFT development initiatives
3. Infrastructure development achievements

You can catch the full replay here.

The emergence of a network of blockchains via proliferation of subnets has always been the long-term vision of the Avalanche platform. Subnets support horizontal scaling of block space and allow individual applications to tailor configurations best suited for their specific needs, while maintaining interoperability and composability with other applications.This approach also promotes a streamlined separation of concerns across applications, preventing bottlenecks such as the launch of a hot NFT collection causing a slowdown in large loan transactions between financial institutions.

Avalanche offers developers a versatile platform for building functional and relevant subnets today, with a strong support team available at Ava Labs.

Avalanche recently announced the launch of the institution-targeted Spruce Testnet as an “Evergreen Subnet”, with initial partners including top-tier asset management firms such as Wellington Management, T. Rowe Price Associates, WisdomTree, and Cumberland. Morgan explained this collaboration is driven by these institutions’ willingness to put effort into internal education on the use cases and benefits enabled by public blockchain rails.

At a high level, Evergreen Subnets are a framework for application-specific blockchains tailored to institutional blockchain deployments. Evergreen Subnets aim to provide institutions with the best aspects of public blockchain infrastructure and developments, preserving the potential for interoperability and composability while granting these institutions the ease of building on enterprise blockchains.

Dexalot is Avalanche’s first central limit order book exchange subnet, aiming to provide low slippage fees in trading. Mentioning Dexalot, Luigi was excited to see the protocol getting off the ground, but also addressed the reason why we haven’t yet seen a proliferation of DeFi subnets in the Avalanche ecosystem.

First, although elastic subnets have been introduced to the network (subnets with permissionless validation),– they are not 100% live. Second, the Avalanche Warm Messaging (AWM) protocol, though live for subnet-to-subnet communication, is not yet live for C-chain-to-subnet communication. The AWM version that will support C-chain-to-subnet communication is anticipated to go live this summer, which will encourage DeFi related subnets to deploy on Avalanche by giving them more streamlined access to the liquidity on the C-chain without relying on third-party bridges.

At the end of March, the Avalanche Foundation announced Avaissance, including the Artist-in-Residence program (AIR) and Mona Lisa Initiative (MLI).

Through April 28, artists worldwide can apply for the digital AIR residency to enjoy a 6-month program with funding, mentorship, virtual workshops, and support from the Avalanche ecosystem, regardless of skill level or medium. The first group of 50+ residents will be revealed in May. In addition to the AIR, the Mona Lisa Initiative will partner with the curatorial teams of various art-focused DAOs, donating Avalanche NFTs to these DAOs in order to enlarge Avalanche NFT collections and showcase the talents of emerging Avalanche NFT artists.

Ava Labs expressed confidence that the Avalanche community boasts a talented group of homegrown artists, envisioning the NFT sector as one of long-term relevance and accelerating growth. Luigi believes artists and innovators will continue to explore and invent different use cases of arts-on-chain.

Ava Labs seeks to expand the Avalanche network by developing infrastructure partnerships and engaging cloud service providers to help enterprises, institutions, and entrepreneurs ensure the security and uptime of their applications and subnets. Partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) deliver enterprise-grade products and blockchain services integrated with Avalanche tooling, making it easy for everyone, from institutions to individuals, to build on the Avalanche blockchain.

Avalanche Foundation introduced HyperSDK in late February, a framework designed to simplify the process of building custom blockchains. Avalanche offers subnets and a versatile, virtual machine (VM)-agnostic platform where developers can run a range of popular VMs such as EVM, WASM-VM, and the Solana VM. With Hyper SDK, developers can create a customized VM tailored to their specific use cases with just 300 lines of code. HyperSDK is open-source and receives weekly contributions from the community.

HyperSDK is designed to enable developers to effortlessly tap into a fast execution environment without having to create extensive code from the ground up, dramatically shortening the time required to construct a custom blockchain (“HyperChain”) from several months to a few days.

You can follow major developer updates on community calls hosted by Ava Labs’ Head of Engineering on Twitter at Patrick O’Grady and Avalanche’s official account.

The Cortina upgrade aims to simplify the Avalanche platform and its underlying technology. X-chain, one of Avalanche’s primary chains, is transitioning from a DAG structure (directed acyclic graph) to a linear structure for technical reasons.

Avalanche’s Snowman++ Consensus, which governs all of its subnets, does not support the DAG structure. Resolving this incompatibility will enable the X-chain’s integration with Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM) and help reduce tech debt, making the platform (including primary chains and subnets) more streamlined, faster, and easier to upgrade in the future.

The Cortina upgrade activated successfully on the Fuji Testnet on April 6, 2023 and will activate on the Avalanche Mainnet at 11AM ET on Tuesday, April 25th.

In March, AvaLabs and Avalanche Foundation introduced the Glacier API (beta) – a one-stop-shop for all blockchain data on Avalanche, Ethereum and the official API service indexing Avalanche Subnets.

This initiative focuses on building a backend-as-a-service for the blockchain. As a development leader in the Avalanche community, Ava Labs delivers subnets and creates tooling services like Core Wallet, Avalanche Subnet Block Explorer, token transfers, and more.

“By using Glacier, application developers can easily build products that leverage real-time and historical transaction data—all served through highly performant APIs. Developers joining the Glacier API Beta will gain free access to the platform’s service and have the opportunity to shape future feature development.” – Ava Labs.

In keeping with Avalanche’s culture, Ava Labs aims to guarantee the reliability of the network and provide the necessary tools for builders. This includes developing in-house RPCs for the C-chain rather than depending on third-party solutions. In the same spirit, the team launched Core Wallet to enhance Avalanche’s user experience.

Core Wallet has finally arrived on iOS in early March, offering the crypto experience to an additional 1B+ users worldwide who are always on the move. This release marks a significant milestone, as the Core Wallet is now available for crypto enthusiasts on multiple platforms, ranging from web browsers as an extension to both Android and IOS devices.

So now, if you want to build on Avalanche, there is a reliable explorer, wallet infrastructure, RPC infrastructure, and validator infrastructure; everything is there for you to build with the Avalanche community.

You can catch the full replay here.

The information contained in this call is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice.