TL;DR
- Avalanche combines speed and scalability without compromising security, achieving consensus in under one second.
- The protocol only requires a fraction of validators per round, making it significantly faster than Solana and Ethereum.
- Aly Madhavji compared the network to the foundation of a house and highlighted its low cost, efficiency, and ease for developers to integrate new applications.
Emin Gün Sirer, founder of Avalanche, said the blockchain industry has moved past its experimental stage and that the main strength of his network lies in combining speed, scalability, and security without compromising any of them.
In an interview with James Heckman and Aly Madhavji, Sirer explained that Avalanche can reach decisions in less than a second thanks to a consensus design that avoids the bottlenecks of traditional models.
He described consensus as the core of every blockchain—the mechanism that keeps balances, transactions, and ledgers synchronized. In Bitcoin, that consensus depends on an energy-intensive mining process.
Why Avalanche Is Different
In classical protocols, validators must all communicate with one another to reach agreement, a structure that, according to Sirer, “doesn’t scale” because it requires every node to participate simultaneously. Avalanche removes that limitation by using a system where only a subset of validators takes part in each decision round, allowing agreements to be processed in under a second. By comparison, he estimated that Solana takes around 12.8 seconds and Ethereum about two and a half minutes.
When asked about the cost of such speed, Sirer stated that it does not come at the expense of security. He explained that Avalanche, like Bitcoin, offers probabilistic guarantees: an error margin exists, but it’s so small that it’s effectively irrelevant. He cited Satoshi Nakamoto, who defended this model by noting that even computer chips operate with extremely low probabilities of error. For Sirer, the speed gains achieved by AVAX come with “virtually zero” security trade-off.
The Foundation of a House
Aly Madhavji, partner at Blockchain Founders Fund, compared Avalanche to “the foundation of a house,” the layer on which applications and services used by end users are built. His fund, which has invested in over 200 blockchain startups, chose AVAX in numerous projects for its speed, low cost, and ease of integration.
Madhavji recalled Ethereum’s early years, when sending a transaction could cost $600 or take six hours, and emphasized that Avalanche has solved most of those limitations.
