Consolidating Our Identity: Ava Labs, Avalanche, and AVAX
We have come a long way since the Team Rocket whitepaper. Today, we are excited to move forward with our consolidated direction.
A lot has changed in the two years since Team Rocket shared a whitepaper outlining Avalanche. A few of us at Cornell moved the paper and its ideas forward with Team Rocket to formally introduce our family of consensus protocols. In the early days of our research, we were just a small group. Today, there’s a global team and community building the protocol and promise detailed in those pages.
Over the last year, the project has grown tremendously. From a community that spans a countless number of countries to a testnet that achieved over a thousand validators, we can feel the excitement across all facets of the project. As we complete the final preparations for mainnet launch, we’ve realized that this community growth will soon outpace the rails that we’ve built for our brand. It became very apparent that we needed to simplify the brand to what we’ve always been.
We are Avalanche. $AVAX, Avalanche’s native token, memorializes the many ideas and realities that continue to converge around the project and the intersections within it. The X, a symbol and constant reminder that the network, while decentralized and global, is only as valuable as the connections it’s able to forge.
The Journey That Brought Us Here
In the process of growing rapidly, we created different sub-brands and vehicles to bring Avalanche to the masses, often relying on the short-hand “AVA” — a habit we all fell into after typing Avalanche a few hundred times per week alongside thousands of lines of code.
Compound that with character limits across social channels, and you’ve got a recipe for naming initiatives with the short-hand (a perfect example is our community growth platform Avalanche Hub).
This nomenclature was fine for a smaller community, but as Avalanche picked up momentum and rapidly grew across the world, we found that too often the connection to AVA was being lost in communication.
A few weeks ago, as more than one thousand developers were concurrently participating as full block-producing nodes on the Denali Testnet, we went back to the drawing board for the project’s brand. We filled it with research into ticker names, domains, social handles, and symbols with one goal in mind: make it clear to anyone in the world what our community is rallying behind and what the network achieves.
Through discussion, debate, and careful weighing of pros and cons, we kept finding ourselves back to our roots and what the next phase will achieve.
Moving Forward with Avalanche and $AVAX.
A network built by and for its community. A token and internet of finance defined by velocity, efficiency, and innovation in new products and services. This is what Avalanche is all about. Just like the occurrence in nature, we hope to build a project driven by compounding momentum that will, someday, be unstoppable.
Thank you to everyone who participated in Avalanche’s progress thus far, and we welcome anyone who wants to be the next contributor. We’re on the precipice of making history together, and I couldn’t be more excited for what lies ahead.
Note: AVA Labs, the team supporting the development of Avalanche, will stay the same.
About Avalanche:
Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized finance applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Developers who build on Avalanche can easily create powerful, reliable, and secure applications and custom blockchain networks with complex rulesets or build on existing private or public subnets.
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