Who founded Avalanche?

• Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist. He was a tenured associate professor of computer science at Cornell University and co-director of IC3, an organization. He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems and computer networking.
• Before becoming a professor at Cornell University Sirer worked at AT&T Bell Labs on Plan 9, at DEC SRC, and at NEC.
• Sirer is best known for having implemented the first currency that used Proof-of-Work (PoW) to mint coins, Karma, which was published in 2003.
• His research on selfish mining, characterizing the scale and centralization of existing cryptocurrencies, and having proposed the leading protocols for on-chain and off-chain scaling.
• He co-developed the SPIN (operating system) and also led the Nexus OS effort.
• He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002 under the supervision of Brian N. Bershad

Source: Ava Labs.

What gives Avalanche value?

• Avalanche is a platform for so-called “smart contracts,” which empower global, decentralized applications and execute automatically when specific parameters have been fulfilled.
• Smart contract platforms facilitate secure peer-to-peer transactions, such as those traditionally done by banks or other financial institutions. Think of peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer insurance, or even selling your apartment to multiple investors
(“securitization”). The security of smart contracts avoids the need to use a notary, making transactions much less costly then they have been before
• The potential shift of financial transactions to the blockchain is also referred to as Decentralized Finance, or “DeFi”

What is AVAX?

• AVAX is the token underlying the Avalanche network. It is used, amongst others, to pay for transactions on the network.
• It is also newly minted for AVAX holders who lock-up their tokens in the protocol for a specific time period to enhance network security in a mechanism called “staking”.
• If the demand for the Avalanche network increases, demand for AVAX will also increase, which might work out positively on the AVAX price
• The total amount of AVAX that can be minted has a hard cap of 720 million
• Fees paid to use the network are “burned,” meaning they are removed from circulation. This creates a natural, deflationary curb on supply growth, while also propagating a more equitable system where validators do not exponentially grow their holdings.

Throughout this page we will mostly use the term Avalanche to refer to AVAX, as this is most commonly used by most investors. I.e., when we say investing in Avalanche we refer to investing in AVAX.

Source: Ava Labs.