You are welcome. Three weeks ago, I introduced the Avalanche platform in simple terms with illustrations everyone can relate with. I proceeded, two weeks ago, to identify three use cases of Avalanche hiding in plain sight. And last week, I listed and explained five real-world potential use cases of Avalanche one cannot afford to miss. Today, I’ll be digging into the identification of blockchain projects I feel will do great exploits if they migrate to or incorporate Avalanche.
A Change of Direction might mean a launch into Greatness
February 2017, The Growth Revolution published a list of ten popular companies that became super big after changing their gameplay or direction. Companies like Youtube which was a dating website before it was sold, found their true calling after they changed direction. The issue of changing direction is not only limited to centralized companies, but we have also seen a lot of Blockchain-based projects which had to change their parent blockchain before their true beauty becomes revealed.
Blockchain Change- a game Changer for Projects
Projects change blockchain or fork for many reasons which include a change in perspective or Ideology, Bitcoin Cash forked from Bitcoin because some set of people believed the original vision of Satoshi the creator of Bitcoin has been lost. The same was with Hive blockchain a fork of the Steem blockchain because the community believes decentralization should be without central governance controlling matters.
Bitcoin Mining pool challenge: Why Avalanche PoS is Key
Earlier this week I began researching the importance or essence of mining pools to Cryptocurrency mining (I made a report here). I read through a lot of advantages which include monetary returns to the miners who are in the pool as opposed to lone mining rewards which might be once in a blue moon. It is interesting but when I stumbled upon the major disadvantage I retracted because it is something that puts the security of the whole blockchain in jeopardy. At the center was the discovery, the research, and report of Emin Gun Sirer the founder of Avalanche in 2013 that brought the critical mess to light. He stated that a malicious pool with selfish miners can actually take over the whole network and cause a reward drought. Instead of people to see into this and appreciate, most of the comments are against the findings. You can check the article here.
Fast forward seven years later, Bitcoin’s four largest mining pools combined have more than 50% of the hash produced. For Ethereum, 51% of its mining power came from two mining pools twice in history, the second being in 2020. Ethereum classic experienced 51% attacks twice in 2020 due to reorganization. The first was a mining pool going offline resulting in a fork after it came back online. The attacker was able to double spend 5.6miilion USD in ETC.
Emin Gun Sirer created the Avalanche platform which uses Byzantine Fault Tolerance and Directed Acyclic Graph to secure the network. It uses Proof of Stake with an Anti Sybil Attack Mechanism to establish its decentralization and distribute a fair reward to validators (read more here). Some major advantages of this are that it requires far less energy to produce new blocks and maintain the network, it is also a mining pool resistant. The Anti-Sybil mechanism ensures that validators do not farm rewards by having multiple nodes or fake nodes. The staking model ensures that there is a cap to how much can be staked and the staking period also has a minimum and maximum. Projects that have seen the light have migrated from proof of work to proof of stake, but many are not doing it right.
Ethereum-Based Projects seeking new Home
Many startups like Safe Haven and Ecomi started their journey with Ethereum blockchain but had to move to another faster blockchain because the initial blockchain is slower with huge transaction costs.
Emin Gun Sirer, in a Livestream with Haipo yang on August 5, talked about communications with big Ethereum Based projects like Compound, Uniswap, and MakerDAO to migrate functionality to Avalanche. Obviously, the speed, transaction costs on Avalanche coupled with a lot of other features must have attracted them into agreeing that it is a wise choice. Hopefully, these projects will make a lot of achievements like YouTube and other centralized companies, mentioned at the start of this article after they change their direction.
Ethereum Based Projects that will make a huge impact if they Move to Avalanche and Why:
I have also compiled a list of innovative Ethereum-based projects that I feel should migrate to Avalanche so that the beauty of what they are doing can really show forth.
Decentraland
After the NFT hype and dump experience with CryptoKitties in 2017, it seems all hopes are lost, but when Decentraland came into the game, there was another story. Decentraland reinvented how people look and interact with NFTs. It is a game that has brought what Real Estate could be on the blockchain to life. With the ability to own lands and develop anything on top of it as blockchain serves as the foundation, the possibilities remain limitless. Aside from owning lands, here comes my favorite part, people can own and trade wearables and names. For me, that alone is a way to be an NFT trader and gain a lot of money, I actually paid to learn how to trade NFTs and make gains.
But
But the platform is built on Ethereum blockchain ?, which means huge huge fees (yes I mean that that’s why I used two ‘huges’). It is bad if you want to trade a wearable say a ‘Decentraland cap’ and the fee to interact with the smart contract to transfer or receive it is actually way larger than the amount you wish to sell or buy the NFT. It becomes worse when you want to trade using the Decentraland marketplace, for every action (bid, accept bid, transfer, etc.) requires a mining fee. Days on Ethereum when there is congestion, there are fee hikes thus discouraging users. People who do a one-off trade may not understand, but people who are traders understand better.
Why Avalanche
If Decentraland can migrate its platform to the Avalanche platform, then risks of huge fees for each action will not be a barrier again. Traders will be able to interact, bid, and transfer NFTs in seconds. Fortunately, Avalanche supports EVM so it will as easy as copy-paste. Onboarding the platform users to a new blockchain can be done in phases. I am very positive that if Decentraland can achieve this, it will open a new level of awesomeness.
Ren Protocol
Ren Protocol reimagined Decentralized Finance (Defi) by decentralizing custodian. In many DeFis, users have to entrust their funds in the hands of the project team. But for Ren protocol, the private keys of the wallets where users deposit their funds are controlled by validators who have staked some Ren tokens. The staking serves as a security that Validators will not cheat the system. With Ren protocol, assets that are from other blockchains can be created like RenBTC for BTC wrapped on Ethereum blockchain, RenDGB for Digibyte, etc. so that users can enjoy the benefits of Defis on Ethereum blockchain.
Migrating to Avalanche…
Sounds familiar? Those who understand or know about Avalanche subnets know that this project can easily fit into one. You can read about subnets here. Ren protocol can create a subnet where validators who stake Avax coins can do the work of dark nodes in Ren protocol. Because of the way subnets are designed, validators can be chosen based on the criteria as set by the creator, in this case, Ren protocol. I believe Ren can make it compulsory for validators to also stake REN to be part of their subnet. All these are in addition to the fact that Avalanche is actually faster than Ethereum in processing transactions and with a lower transaction fee.
You can begin to understand the reason why I want Ren Protocol to migrate or incorporate it on Avalanche.
Unstoppable Domains
Almost everyone knows about Unstoppable Domains. It allows anyone to create and own a domain name that cannot be deleted or tampered with because it is based on blockchain technology. Anyone can own a domain because it is actually an NFT on Ethereum blockchain. Recently, in association with the Opera browser, a decentralized hosting based on Interplanetary File System (IPFS) was included in the domain names so that people can freely own an unstoppable website, no yearly fee no censorship.
For the reasons stated above, Ethereum blockchain is only a set back to what the potential of this project can be. Being on avalanche, trading, or transferring domain names will be seamless and very secure.
Isn’t It Time for Ethereum Classic to Re-Imagine Its consensus- Why Moving to Avalanche can bring it ahead of Eth2.0
From the history and timeline of Ethereum Classic, it can be said that it has faced one of the most attacks ever faced by any single blockchain and still standing. From the DAO attack that caused the first chain split to date, it still kept its name. But, when these attacks are becoming too much, I believe it is a pointer to the fact that there needs to be a reroute on how to secure the network. Ethereum was created with the vision of switching over to a Proof of Stake consensus and it is working to achieve that soon. Though sharding may not be the best solution to scaling, the devs are making moves to make the switch over to a new consensus. Ethereum classic should have it’s developers rethink and plan on switching over to a new consensus.
Better still, Avalanche is open and ready to accommodate this blockchain since it was designed to be a blockchain of blockchains with tools ready to support any Virtual Machine. Migrating the whole network to Avalanche will be a very wise step which in no way will affect its PoW consensus. I believe strongly that Avalanche should be considered moving forward.
Closing Thoughts
The fact is that Avalanche is phenomenal in all aspects, projects on blockchains like Ethereum should begin to consider migrating their apps to it. The team has put forth a grant for developers to develop some specific Dapps, it shows they are willing and ready to support projects on Avalanche.
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Thanks for reading
