on the crypto
No cryptocurrency has been as hot this year as Shiba Inu. It came out of nowhere to become one of the most talked about and most traded digital currencies on the market.
However, there are always other cryptocurrencies that have the potential to be the next big thing. Most of them never leave the pack. But some do. Here is an explosive cryptocurrency that has just sidelined Shiba Inu.
Beware of falling rocks
For much of this year, Avalanche (AVAX) has been trading at a market cap of $ 5 billion or less. It was big enough to grab attention but not big enough to rank as a top-tier cryptocurrency.
However, Avalanche began to gain momentum in August 2021. It stabilized a couple of months later after outperforming several other cryptocurrencies based on market cap. Someone may have thought that Avalanche was running out of steam. Instead, he was just catching his breath.
Avalanche went on a big run again starting in early November. The token received a particularly big boost after Deloitte decided to build disaster relief software platforms on the Avalanche blockchain. Admittedly, Avalanche's earnings weren't nearly as impressive as Shiba Inu's in October. However, Avalanche has steadily climbed the list of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world.
While Avalanche had been flying for the past few weeks, the Shiba Inu was sinking. And last week, Avalanche overtook Shiba Inu to become the No. 11 based on market cap with Shiba Inu dropping to point no. 12.
Why Avalanche is so attractive
Avalanche is an idea of Cornell University professor Emin Gün Sirer. He is a pioneer in cryptographic research. Gün Sirer even designed a virtual currency concept six years before the release of the landmark Bitcoin white paper.
What really sets Avalanche apart from other cryptocurrencies is its architecture. Blockchain like Ethereum (quotation ETH) face large-scale decentralization problems. This can result in high gas costs. However, Avalanche solves these problems by incorporating three distinct but interoperable blockchains into its network.
The Avalanche Exchange Chain (X-Chain) is used to create and exchange the platform's native AVAX tokens. The Contract Chain (C-Chain) allows developers to build decentralized applications using smart contracts. The Platform Chain (P-Chain) coordinates the validators for the verification of transactions and creates subnets (dynamic sets of validators).
Thanks to this architecture, Avalanche can process more than 4.500 transactions per second at low cost while remaining highly scalable. Perhaps more importantly, its time to finalization (when a transaction has been irreversibly added to the blockchain) is less than two seconds, much faster than other blockchains.
Unsurprisingly, developers have flocked to the platform. There are now more than 150 projects in the Avalanche ecosystem, including crypto wallets and non-fungible token markets (NFTs).
Does Avalanche have stamina?
Like many other cryptocurrencies, Avalanche's price has dropped due to recent news of the emergence of the omicron variant of the coronavirus. However, investors should expect significant volatility in the near term.
Does Avalanche have long-term staying power? It might very well. Of course, there are many other blockchains that are competing to dethrone Ethereum. But Avalanche is gaining adoption and should be seen as one of the top contenders.
