nickbrons.hl 🔺

The latest Avalanche upgrade introduced Continuous Execution (CE), a new way to improve the performance of blockchains by taking advantage of parallelism. It’s exciting technical stuff that you should know about so you understand what makes Avalanche so fast, or if you're not using Avalanche, what you're missing out on. Avalanche has always had an architecture that takes advantage of coarse-grained parallelism. Namely, Avalanche L1s capture parallelism via separate chains, where unrelated groups of activities can execute independently of each other, without having to wait for or congest shared resources. This was a huge step forward when we introduced it 6 years ago. Compared to older, single-chain systems, this multichain architecture enabled Avalanche to offer infinite capacity. A game doesn't have to compete with DeFi on Avalanche, whereas on single chain systems, even an NFT offering would cause problems by creating congestion and bumping transaction fees. While this took advantage of the largest source of parallelism and enabled Avalanche to be one of the fastest chains in the first place, there are further opportunities for improvement, and Continuous Execution taps into the next greatest source of parallelism, namely, the overlap between consensus and execution within a single chain. The two most expensive activities in any blockchain are consensus, that is, the work required to get all of the participants to agree on what happened and when, and execution, the work required to actually process those transactions and update the state of the system. Traditionally, these two activities have taken turns. Continuous Execution allows Avalanche to overlap them. While the system is achieving consensus on one set of transactions, it is simultaneously executing previously agreed-upon transactions. Think of the chain as a jet. Execution is flight, transactions are the fuel, and consensus is refueling. Before CE, the jet had to land every time it needed to refuel. The chain would execute, stop to perform consensus work, execute again, then stop again. Continuous Execution changes that. Now the jet can refuel while it is still in the air. Consensus and execution happen concurrently, so the chain no longer has to constantly switch between the two. The flight becomes continuous, with no unnecessary interruptions or mode switching. To put this in perspective, before CE, Avalanche validators were spending somewhere between 20 to 60 milliseconds per block on verification, sometimes even as high as 150ms. CE dropped that down to an average of 2 milliseconds of wall clock time with negligible variance. And this is especially important because verification happens at each step during gossip dissemination. It isn’t simply 40 milliseconds saved once. That time was being incurred on every hop as a block spread through the network. There is also a deeper technical point here. The work that previously had to happen in consensus goes from potentially unbounded computation to linear in the number of transactions. We achieve this by taking advantage of the monotonicity of gas prices under maximum load, so the execution thread is never forced to pause due to estimation errors. We’ve always prided ourselves on bringing the best of science to blockchain technology, on being pragmatic, and on attacking the highest-yield opportunities first. With Continuous Execution built on top of the multi-threaded Avalanche architecture, Avalanche has taken advantage of the two biggest sources of parallelism: coarse-grained parallelism across separate chains, and the overlap between consensus and execution within a single chain. For Avalanche, consensus and execution no longer need to operate in bursts, constantly stopping and waiting on each other, it just keeps going with no dead time.

This is exactly why the L1 architecture exists. Not as a feature, as the founding premise. Different businesses need different chains, with their own rules, their own compliance, their own performance. We built for that from the start. 🔺

Avalanche was designed for the moment when blockchain would move beyond experimentation and become infrastructure for global finance and enterprise. That moment is here, and today’s leadership appointments build on Ava Labs’ progress as we carry this vision forward. I’m pleased to welcome @CharleyCooper01 as President of Ava Labs. Charley brings the operational discipline, regulatory experience, and institutional perspective needed to turn our technical foundation into broader global adoption. @john1wu will transition from President to Senior Advisor, where his judgment, relationships, and knowledge of our business will remain invaluable. I want to thank John for being a great partner and a leader for both Ava Labs and the Avalanche ecosystem. Together we've been at this from day one, taking the blockchain idea from concept to commercialization. We've lived through the milestones that built this company: our first business partners, mainnet, COVID, taking the stage together at the first Avalanche Summit in Barcelona, countless other Ava Labs and Avalanche events, and thousands of hours spent shaping strategy together — all the way to where Avalanche stands today. He's been a fantastic champion for blockchain adoption across Wall Street and some of the world's largest institutions. @encycloplydia has also been appointed Chief Financial Officer after serving in the role on an interim basis. Lydia’s financial expertise and leadership further strengthen an already exceptional executive team. My role as CEO remains unchanged. I will continue leading Ava Labs’ long-term vision and ensuring that Avalanche remains the most advanced and dependable platform for builders, institutions, and enterprises. We have the technology, the team, and the opportunity. Now we execute.