A blockchain protocol designed by one of the most prominent blockchain scholars has launched a public testnet.

AVA Labs has its roots in Cornell University, where its co-founder Emin Gün Sirer had been teaching for almost two decades. In 2003, he started Karma, the first cryptocurrency to use a Proof-of-Work mechanism. 

Internet of value

AVA co-founder Kevin Sekniqi told Cointelegraph that the best way to describe the new protocol is the “internet of blockchains”. 

One of the key features of this “empty framework” is that virtually any blockchain network can become interoperable with AVA. For instance, there is a fork of Ethereum running on the AVA engine called Athereum, which, according to Sekniqi, achieves most of the goals of Ethereum 2.0. Nonetheless, Sekniqi admits that it is unlikely that the Ethereum team will accept Athereum as Ethereum 2.0.

Sekniqi described AVA’s aspirations to transforming the flow of value, similar to the way the internet transformed the flow of information:

“We want to create an open ecosystem where things of value are created and shared and moved around freely. And these things of value can be currencies, can be assets, can be gold, can be whatever it may be, any digital representation of it. It can move around freely in the same way that it moves around the internet, the same way that email moves around.”

Empty framework

According to Sekniqi, AVA is also more flexible than any other blockchain — users can choose who gets to manage, store and interact with their data. He sums the team’s accomplishments:

“So we've built this ecosystem where you can launch new blockchains, whether they're permissioned or permissionless, it does not matter. And they can all interoperate with each other freely, and move value around. And each one of these deployed blockchains within the AVA Internet are running at blazingly high speeds.”

Recently, Ethereum co-founder and founder of Cardano (ADA) Charles Hoskinson named AVA as one of the most promising projects. The AVA mainnet launch is expected in July, until then, the enthusiasts can “start actively staking” on the testnet.

Cross-chain interoperability has been one of the hottest areas in the blockchain space, with several projects like Polkadot and Cosmos trying to tackle the issue. Only time will tell whether AVA will become the one protocol to rule them all.