Athereum, Ethereum on Avalanche Consensus — AVA Labs

Athereum, Avalanche and Ethereum, full support for the EVM on top of Avalanche consensus

Ethereum gave the world the ability to build decentralized applications. Developers, entrepreneurs, and crypto-enthusiasts can plainly see the potential decentralized networks provide to global economies. Without this groundwork, AVA Labs likely would not be where it is today. The field of decentralization owes Ethereum a great deal of appreciation for the transformational role they play in the space.

In honor of this, we proudly announce the release of the Athereum testnet subnetwork on Avalanche.

Athereum is a “spoon”, or friendly fork, of Ethereum, which benefits from the Avalanche consensus protocol and applications in the Ethereum ecosystem. After 4 years of development, Ethereum boasts a rich dapp toolkit. Developers will be enabled with their full suite of tools, such as Remix, Metamask, MyEtherWallet, Web3js, Truffe Suite, Embark framework, and others on Athereum.

What is the Avalanche Platform?

The Avalanche network is a highly performant, scalable, customizable, and modular platform-of-platforms. Avalanche allows developers to create their own subnetworks which may issue, use, and trade any type of digital asset imaginable. Athereum is the first subnetwork supported on the Avalanche platform integrating an existing virtual asset. Athereum possesses the entire functionality built into in the EVM. In lieu of the ETH token, the native token supported on the Athereum platform is ATH.

What is a friendly fork?

This isn’t a contentious fork. We are simply porting over the Ethereum state at a to-be-determined block height. All existing Ethereum holders will have access to ATH equal to the current amount of ETH they hold in their wallets. This is not intended to replace Ethereum and the fork is simply to provide an alternative environment to run your decentralized applications at a higher throughput and with faster finality. This is intended to inspire more research and development into decentralized applications as well as optimizations for the EVM itself.

What is Avalanche Consensus?

Avalanche consensus new category of consensus protocols. It differs from longest-chain (Nakamoto) consensus in that it provides transaction throughput as high as the EVM allows. Transactions using Avalanche confirm within seconds. The Avalanche network can support thousands of nodes fully participating in consensus, without any subcommittees or degradation in consensus speed. One could say we solved the trilemma, but we never believed in the trilemma in the first place :)

We encourage the Ethereum community to port over existing applications and test out the power of Athereum. We are looking forward to working with Ethereum towards building a better future.

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.