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AVA, a blockchain startup that came out of stealth in May this year, has launched Athereum, the first proof-of-concept deployment of its subnetworks functionality.
Emin Gün Sirer, Co-Founder and CEO of AVA Labs, made the announcement at the latest iteration of the ethereum developer conference Devcon.
Sirer explained that the subnetworks functionality makes it easy for existing projects to migrate to the AVA platform and leverage the Avalanche consensus protocol, which offers “a range of elevated performance capabilities.”
AVA labs describes the AVA platform as a “highly performant, scalable, customizable, and modular platform-of-platforms,” which allows developers to create their own subnetworks which may issue, use, and trade any type of digital asset.
The platform is powered by the Avalanche consensus protocol, which provides high transaction throughput and allows for high immutability and increased security. AVA said that transactions using Avalanche confirm within seconds, adding that the AVA network can support “thousands of nodes fully participating in consensus, without any subcommittees or degradation in consensus speed.”
In an online post, the company said:
“Athereum is a “spoon”, or friendly fork, of Ethereum, which benefits from the Avalanche consensus protocol and applications in the Ethereum ecosystem.”
Athereum is the first subnetwork supported on the AVA Platform integrating an existing virtual asset. It sees complete Ethereum blockchain deployed on AVA via its subnetwork functionality. The native token supported on the Athereum platform is ATH.
“Moving all of Ethereum over to AVA is the perfect illustration of its potential, as it delivers radically improved scalability and performance properties for the network, all within an isolated environment that allows developers to experiment and deploy a range of new features and services. With the AVA mainnet launch soon approaching, this association with Ethereum is a first step to establishing AVA’s capabilities within the industry,” Sirer said.
According to a press release shared with TokenPost, Athereum provides a new replay-protected network for Ethereum that leverages the high-performance AVA platform. As the first PoC deployment of AVA’s subnetworks functionality, Athereum preserves the coin balances in Ethereum as well as the deployed contracts, while providing a free high-performance platform for demanding DeFi applications.
AVA Labs said that Athereum has been initially deployed as a non-value-bearing testnet, adding that it currently offers unprecedented finality, within 1/10th of a second.
Kevin Sekniqi, Co-Founder and Chief Protocol Architect of AVA Labs, said that Ethereum was a “natural choice” for the first proof-of-concept release.
“Our architectural design enables developers to move existing decentralized applications wholesale, as well as build new types of assets that run intelligently and obey special rules on AVA. We invite any other protocols looking to leverage our compounding network effects to get in touch,” he said.
AVA Labs raised $6 million in February from a roster of notable names in the venture capital and cryptocurrency space, including Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, MetaStable, Initialized Capital, Naval Ravikant, and Ramtin Naimi of Abstract Ventures.
