Avalanche is a smart contract platform that runs on a proof-of-stake consensus protocol. It was developed by Ava Labs, a team of Cornell University researchers led by Professor Emin Gün Sirer. The project raised $42 million in funding from a number of high-profile investors prior to its launch in 2020. Avalanche is designed to be scalable and energy-efficient. The native currency of Avalanche is AVAX.

Avalanche is built on top of a new consensus protocol called Avalanche consensus, which is designed to be more scalable than existing protocols. The goal of Avalanche is to provide a platform where financial applications can be built without the need for trust in third parties. The platform will allow developers to create decentralized applications (dApps) that run on top of its infrastructure. In addition, users will be able to hold and transfer assets securely on the platform using smart contracts.

The Avalanche platform is also said to be much more scalable than its main competitor Ethereum, with the ability to process up to 4500 transactions per second.