BCH Avalanche Transactions Show Finality Speeds 10x Faster Than Ethereum

Over the last few weeks, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developers and community members have been discussing a pre-consensus method called Avalanche. Now BCH proponents have begun to notice the protocol has been applied to the Bchd full node implementation and the proof of concept officially running on the BCH mainnet.

The Benefits of Avalanche and PoW Running in Parallel

The Avalanche proof-of-concept is a consensus algorithm that adds Byzantine fault tolerant proofs to a blockchain network so nodes can differentiate between two conflicting transactions. The protocol communicates with nodes in real time in order to bring consensus in a more efficient manner. This is because Avalanche queries the network of nodes and asks them to come to pre-consensus on which of the two conflicting transactions are preferred.

People are often confused with Avalanche being applied to BCH because it’s also being used in a proof-of-stake (PoS) project designed by Cornell Professor Emin Gün Sirer. On the BCH chain, Avalanche is only being used for pre-consensus and runs parallel with the original proof-of-work consensus mechanism. A number of BCH developers and proponents believe Avalanche will make the BCH network far more robust.

Avalanche discussions have increased over the last week since the protocol is now running on the main network. “Ok, the Avalanche proof of concept is officially running on mainnet,” explained Bchd developer Chris Pacia on Feb. 7. The programmer also left a link to the protocol’s Github repository which gives developers a gist of the Avalanche pre-consensus specification implemented in the Bchd branch.