Avalanche Blockchain Protocol, AVAX, And The DeFi Future: Dinis Guarda Interviews Emin Gün Sirer, Founder and CEO of Ava Labs

In the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast, Emin Gün Sirer, Founder and CEO of Ava Labs, explains the fastest and most reliable consensus protocol behind Avalanche. Dinis also discusses Emin’s exemplary background in academia, the integration of AI and blockchain, particularly in gaming and digital asset tokenisation. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.

Emin Gün Sirer is a distinguished computer scientist and the co-founder and CEO of Ava Labs, the company behind Avalanche, a high-speed, eco-friendly blockchain platform designed to support custom smart contract applications. 

From winning a scholarship at Princeton University to being an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, Emin has an extensive background in academia, catering to his bent towards research and innovation, which ultimately led him to co-author the influential paper “Majority is not Enough”, exposing vulnerabilities in Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism.

During the interview with Dinis Guarda, Emin Gün Sirer discusses the foundation for co-founding Ava Labs and developing the Avalanche protocol:

"The impetus for branching out of academia and building a new blockchain was this discovery of a new consensus protocol family.

It's not yet another consensus protocol. It's really an entirely new family.  When I was in graduate school, there was only one way of achieving consensus: that they all worked under the same principle of all-to-all communication. We call those protocols classical consensus protocols, but they would never have been suitable for a setting like Bitcoin because they’re limited in their scalability.

The reason why I was so flabbergasted when I saw that paper from Satoshi was that it introduced a second family of consensus protocols based on proof of work, and that is far more scalable, but it’s very slow. It consumes an enormous amount of energy.

What allowed us to branch out of academia was our discovery of a third family of protocols that work on a different principle. It’s the Avalanche family of consensus protocols that works not by all-to-all communication but far more efficiently. You don’t have to; every computer doesn’t have to talk to every other computer.

That’s where Avalanche gets the speed up from. It has to go public, it has to go public in a setting that is controlled well.  I wanted to be in control of how we took it out. I wanted to make sure that the tech was done justice to, and that’s how we ended up creating our company to build the software and building Avalanche."

The Ava Labs ecosystem

Emin Gün Sirer discusses the challenges and transformative process of shifting from academia to building Ava Labs and the Avalanche protocol.

"So as an academic, you write papers and as an academic, you're beholden to your peers, and that's about it. But now, as an entrepreneur, you have to build something that actually solves real-world problems.

You have to not just come up with a theoretical improvement but a practical implementation that doesn’t suffer from any of the issues which had been prevalent earlier, that distinguishes itself, has product-market fit, and so on.

I was lucky enough again to be in a part of the country that hadn't been mined by a bunch of other startups. So we were in upstate New York. It was a great place to start, and we quickly outgrew Upstate New York.

The move to New York City was a fantastic idea because we found ourselves closer to people who hold huge amounts of assets. This whole game it’s not a technological game. It is not like a tech trick that will sort of save the day.

There are a lot of competitors who see it as such. You know, they have a little tech trick, and they go to San Francisco, they get a bunch of techies, they build some software. That's not gonna do it.

Moving to New York City is closely coupled with digital asset or asset issuers who want to be digital, right? And being in a part of the country that most other people were not at with a full of other companies that are leading in their own domains, was a fantastic boost for us and we've been growing ever since."

The avalanche protocol for DeFi

Emin Gün Sirer discusses how Avalanche made significant strides in decentralised finance (DeFi):

"One of the things that we take pride in is the fact that we're kind of like the adults in the room when it comes to crypto.

Crypto has a lot of people who, you know, make a lot of noise, but at the end of the day, they're not necessarily advancing what we know, not necessarily bringing forth anything new to the table.

It really helped us that we could bring that science to practice. We didn't have to rely on additional researchers, as we were the ones who were doing that work.

We could go to institutions on Wall Street and say, 'Hey, you know, I know how you work, I know your pain points, and we can address those.’ There was an opposition between blockchain people, between crypto people and institutional people; they didn't trust each other.

The thinking was we're going to go down with the dollar. We're going to take the system down. We're not going to have currencies. Bitcoin will replace the dollar itself; it doesn't permit the sort of incorporation of any restrictions by any jurisdiction.

We were like Look, this is just a technology, and it doesn't necessarily have to come in with this tear everything down mindset. We can build systems that can incorporate restrictions that meet regulatory needs.

We architected Avalanche very differently from Bitcoin, very differently from Ethereum, Solana, and others, to be able to allow it to be incorporated easily by people with differing needs.

It was due to our backgrounds of being TRD 5, being integrated. So it's a very different mindset and a very different approach to the entire blockchain dilemma."

AI, Blockchain, & Gaming

Emin Gün Sirer discusses the rapid evolution of AI, blockchain, and their impact on society, particularly in the realms of gaming, finance, and digital assets:

"There’s an enormous push into AI, people realise that it’s going to have enormous societal impact and a lot of money is going into it because these AI agents are very expensive to train, very expensive to train.

The costs are also coming down. I think we’re going to see practical AI agents being trained for specialised uses for a lot less than they have been in the past, and we will see their quality of effort and quality of intelligence rise over time.

We’ve reached a certain inflection point. Costs have come down, and it takes less than a penny to do a transaction on Avalanche. It typically costs less than a hundredth of a penny to do anything you want on Avalanche; it’s super cheap.

We’re going to see more commoditisation of block space. It’s very easy to start your own Avalanche L1 to have your blockchain that can communicate with all of the infrastructure we’ve built, and you’re immediately integrated into exchanges and all that other blockchain infrastructure.

Old systems that had societal negative societal impact, like proof of work that were burning fossil fuels, are going down. Avalanche is a green, sustainable technology.

At the confluence of all of these, we are going into an era where blockchains and cryptocurrencies are not a game of constantly promising things we can deliver. Avalanche has shown that even for very demanding applications like computer games, you can have a blockchain that can uphold their incredibly demanding needs.

This game called Off the Grid, for example, has 15 million users, It’s been out a few months, 15 million users already, and all of these people are, stealing each other’s mechanical arms and mechanical legs and guns, and all of those are blockchain transactions, Nobody even realises that those are blockchain transactions.

DeFi itself has shown to be a big, big thing. Stablecoins have perfect product-market fit for this; we’re seeing the rise of stablecoins even as we speak.

Every asset, every single asset, wants to be digital. Your house deeds want to be digital, your car title wants to be digital, your jewellery wants to be digital, your gold wants to be digital, certainly, your financial assets have to be digital.

“Avalanche is bringing AI into blockchains to try to make the programming of smart contracts far more natural. We want to obviate the need to learn a programming language like Solidity, obviate the need to learn how to write code. In fact, take out programming altogether, and instead, the idea that we're exploring at the moment is what we call coin-operated agents. That is to say, having a blockchain where the users program the chain in their natural language”.