Avalanche is a protocol for solving consensus in a network of unreliable machines, where failures may be crash-fault or Byzantine. The protocol was anonymously introduced on IPFS on May 16, 2018 and was formalized in more detail by Cornell University researchers in 2019. Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality, and has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol.
