Brief Introduction to Avalanche Architecture
AVA Labs is the first project building on the Avalanche protocol, a novel probabilistic consensus protocol that harnesses metastability of network sub-sampling to achieve unprecedented guarantees of system safety and scale
Avalanche architecture consists of four key components :The Consensus Engine, Virtual Machines , Chains and Subnets.
Consensus Engine
Snow protocols form the basis for Avalanche consensus. The platform has two consensus engines:
- Avalanche (a DAG-optimized consensus): high-throughput, parallelizable, and simple to prune.
- Snowman (a chain-optimized consensus): high-throughput, totally-ordered, and best for smart contracts.
Virtual Machines (VMs)
Virtual Machines (VMs) in Avalanche are code that uses consensus to produce a database. This database can be in the form of a chain, a DAG, a logfile, or some other data structure that requires synchronization across multiple machines.Every blockchain on the Avalanche network is an instance of a Virtual Machine.When a developer writes a Virtual Machine they do not need to concern themself with lower-level logic like networking, consensus and the structure of the blockchain. Avalanche does all of that behind the scenes so that developers can focus on the thing they’d like to build.Avalanche Virtual Machines make it easy to define a blockchain-based decentralized application. Rather than lightly-used, poorly-understood languages like Solidity, developers can write Virtual Machines in Go
The VM logic can be deployed many times across many subnets.
Subnets
A Subnet, or Subnetwork, is a dynamic set of validators working together to achieve consensus on the state of a set of blockchains. Each blockchain is validated by exactly one Subnet. A Subnet can validate arbitrarily many blockchains. A node may be a member of arbitrarily many Subnets.
Chains
Chains are a generic term for VM instances. Each chain is assigned a ChainID and can be part of one and only one subnet. However, the same VM instance can be used to deploy the same type of chain multiple times within a subnet.
Avalanche is a network of blockchains. There are 3 blockchains that are inherent to the Avalanche network. The Platform Chain (P), Exchange Chain (X), and Contracts Chain (c ) .Everything on Avalanche is a subnet, and every chain is part of a subnet.
The Exchange Chain (X):The X-Chain acts as a decentralized platform for creating of new assets,exchanging/trading smart digital assets and cross-subnet transfers . A smart digital asset is a representation of a real-world thing, such as an equity or bond.One of the assets traded on the X-Chain is AVAX,the Avalanche network’s native token.
The Platform Chain-(P ) :The P-Chain is the metadata chain on Avalanche and coordinates validators and keeps track of active subnets.
The P-Chain’s API allows clients to create subnets, add validators to subnets and create blockchains.
The Contracts Chain (C ):The Contract or C-Chain is the default smart contract chain on Avalanche and enables the creation of any Ethereum-compatible smart contracts .It is an instance of the Ethereum Virtual Machine powered by Avalanche. The smart contracts can be created using the C-Chain’s API.
Useful links:
▪️Website: https://avax.network
▪️Whitepaper: https://avalabs.org/whitepapers
▪️Avalanche Hub: https://community.avax.network
▪️Twitter: https://twitter.com/avalancheavax
▪️Discord: https://chat.avax.network
▪️GitHub: https://github.com/ava-labs
▪️Documentation: https://docs.avalabs.org
▪️Explorer: https://explorer.avax.network
▪️Avalanche-X: https://avalabs.org/avalanche-x
▪️Telegram: https://t.me/avalancheavax
▪️Telegram announcement: https://t.me/avalanche_announcements
▪️Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/company/avalancheavax
▪️Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/avax
▪️Medium: https://medium.com/avalabs
