Unpacking the New AVAX Subnets
The Avalanche platform is one of the more exciting new blockchains that we’ve seen in recent years and they continue to innovate and bring new capabilities to the ecosystem. Recently, they launched new subnets that allow for nuanced interaction between their various layers — which unlocks a lot of new value for those who are building and using the platform.
What Role Do Subnets Play?
A subnet is essentially a validator that pulls together information from different blockchains to achieve consensus across the board. A blockchain can only be validated by one subnet, but a subnet can validate many blockchains — providing the capability for trustless interaction at scale.
For Avalanche, this represents a crucial step forward for the technology because up until now, the various chains have remained somewhat disparate from each other.
On the platform there are three different built-in blockchains:
· The Exchange Chain (X-Chain) creates the space for the creation and trading of digital assets.
· The Platform Chain (P-Chain) acts as the central hub for the platform that manages the metadata, validators, subnets, and a variety of other things that maintain a robust infrastructure. This is also where you can stake AVAX to earn rewards.
· The Contract Chain (C-Chain) allows for the creation of smart contracts.
Avalanche subnets allow for consensus to be reached across these three blockchains — which is an important step for the long-term viability of the platform.
Communicating Between the P-Chain and the C-Chain
By creating these ties between the blockchains, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities for the usability and utility of Avalanche. Creating smart contracts on the C-Chain now becomes that much more useful because they can be executed and validated with ease, aligned with the staking and other governance happening on the P-Chain.
This allows other projects to stake AVAX in a very scalable way and create their own layer 1 layer 2 blockchains. The subnets act as dynamic validators and they are the glue that holds everything together. Previous attempts to do this using other methods have all found themselves mired in various challenges. Whether it’s prohibitively high gas fees, lack of governance procedures, or technical bottlenecks — scalability is a problem yet to be solved.
Avalanche subnets are the latest attempt to do just that and they are an exciting proposition.
Will This Unlock the Next Big Platform?
What remains to be seen is whether these subnets are the key to making Avalanche the next big platform that blockchain developers will build on. There is a lot of debate around the underlying infrastructure of the industry and moves like this places Avalanche right up there as a viable option for projects in a wide variety of categories.
If they have the sort of success that the creators hope they will, then we might just see this becoming the new defacto platform for the next generation of Web 3.0 experiments. And from there — perhaps we’ll even see it becoming the heart of production-ready projects that want to hit the mainstream.
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