Avalanche (AVAX) is the native token of the Avalanche network, a base-layer network on which software developers can build decentralized applications (dapps), smart contracts and custom blockchains.

AVAX recorded its highest-ever price of $144.96 in November 2021. The spike followed an announcement by the company behind Avalanche that it was partnering with global accounting firm Deloitte to “build more efficient disaster relief platforms using the Avalanche blockchain.”

In August 2021, the AVAX price more than doubled following the announcement of a $180 million liquidity mining incentive program, which meant that certain decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols would be launched on the Avalanche network and their users would be rewarded in AVAX tokens in addition to regular interest payments. The first two DeFi protocols involved were Aave and Curve.

In February 2021, when it was 5 months old, the AVAX price spiked and then rapidly fell again as a high volume of transactions on the network slowed down the network and revealed a coding bug. The launch of decentralized exchange Pangolin on the Avalanche network led to a surge of interest in AVAX and a breakdown in the minting validation process, which dramatically slowed down transaction processing speeds. The company said the bug was promptly fixed.

AVAX supply is capped at 720 million tokens, with an initial issuance of 360 million tokens.

The Avalanche network consists of three interrelated blockchains. It claims to outperform leading blockchain platforms like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Polkadot in a range of efficiency measures, including transactional capacity and security.

Avalanche achieves that by using what it calls a ‘family’ of consensus protocols, collectively named Snow. The protocols are among those breaking new cryptographical ground, different from both classical and Nakamoto consensus protocols. It aims to combine classical consensus protocols’ promise of low latency (speed) and high throughput (size) with Nakamoto’s robustness and decentralization.

Users stake AVAX to validate transactions on the Avalanche blockchain, but they aren’t rewarded with AVAX for doing so; instead, AVAX is burned, reducing the supply of the token and tending to support the value of the tokens the users already own. The appeal of this approach is that it benefits all holders of the tokens, not just the largest staker. It is designed to avoid the richest participants growing disproportionately richer.

Nodes on the Avalanche network can earn the right to mint AVAX by staking their tokens. The extent of their right to mint is algorithmically related to the responsiveness and speediness in the consensus process, to encourage better behavior by nodes.

Avalanche was launched in September 2020 by Emin Gun Sirer, a computer science professor at Cornell University and CEO of Ava Labs, the company behind the network.

In December 2021, Ava Labs was selected by Mastercard as one of five startups to join a program to help build up their businesses. And in the same month, a Bank of America report identified Avalanche as a viable alternative to Ethereum.