How does Avalanche work?

Avalanche is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform that provides a secure, fast, and low-cost way to create and manage digital assets.

It is designed to enable developers to quickly build and deploy decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts. At its core, Avalanche is a consensus protocol that uses a novel consensus mechanism called Avalanche consensus. This consensus mechanism is based on the concept of “virtual voting”, which allows for rapid agreement on the state of the ledger without requiring every node in the network to come to an agreement.

The Avalanche consensus protocol works by having nodes in the network broadcast their transactions to all other nodes in the network. These transactions are then verified by a set of validators who are randomly selected from the network. The validators then check if the transaction is valid according to predefined rules and if it is, they sign off on it.

Once enough validators have signed off on a transaction, it is added to the ledger as an accepted transaction. The process of verifying transactions and adding them to the ledger is known as “confirmation” and it happens very quickly in Avalanche due to its unique consensus mechanism. This makes it much faster than other DLT platforms such as Bitcoin or Ethereum which require miners or stakers to confirm transactions before they can be added to the ledger.

In addition, Avalanche also has built-in features such as finality which ensures that once a transaction has been confirmed, it cannot be reversed or changed in any way. This makes it much more secure than other DLT platforms which do not have this feature built-in. Overall, Avalanche provides developers with an efficient way to create and manage digital assets while also providing users with fast and secure transactions that are difficult or impossible for malicious actors to tamper with or reverse.