Avalanche's co-founder helped build a proof-of-work currency six years before Bitcoin... Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) co-designed Karma at Cornell in 2003 with two of his students. His bios call it the first currency to mint coins through proof-of-work, though Wei Dai's 1998 b-money proposal sketched the idea earlier. Karma aimed to stop freeloading on file-sharing networks by tracking what each user gave and took, long before Bitcoin introduced proof-of-work money. In 2013, he and Ittay Eyal found a flaw in Bitcoin's mining rules. A group of miners could secretly hold back the blocks they found, then release them at the right moment to wipe out rivals' work. Even a minority of miners could earn more than they should. The attack is now known as "selfish mining". He later co-founded @AvaLabs, the company behind Avalanche (@avax), and still runs it as CEO.

Over the past several months, we’ve focused on one thing: showing what’s possible when blockchain technology is put to work. Today, we’re bringing that story together. Our new brand reflects a simple belief: the future of blockchain will be defined by businesses using the technology to move money, modernize infrastructure, and create entirely new products and experiences. You’ll also notice a renewed connection to the imagery that inspired our name. Because like an avalanche, transformational change builds slowly, gains momentum, and eventually becomes impossible to ignore. That’s the moment we believe this industry is entering. Avalanche. Technology Built for Business. avalanche.com

Everyone spends a lot of time debating whether blockchain has a real use case. Meanwhile, FIFA World Cup ticket transactions are settling on Avalanche. Over the last few days alone, FIFA ticket activity has generated more than 60,000 transactions on Avalanche. Transaction volume increased as much as 24x above normal levels. Active addresses grew roughly 10x. The tournament has not even started yet. What is most interesting about this is not the transaction count. It’s the user. Nobody is buying a World Cup ticket because they want to use a blockchain. They are buying a ticket because they want to watch their team play. The technology is simply helping make that happen. That is how every successful technology platform eventually evolves. Nobody books an Uber because they care about the infrastructure running underneath it. Nobody streams Netflix because they care about content delivery networks. Nobody sends an email because they are excited about internet protocols. Nobody cares what powers the experience. They care that the experience works. For years, much of the blockchain industry has focused on convincing people to care about blockchains. I think that is the wrong goal. Businesses care about outcomes. Customers care about experiences. Nobody wakes up in the morning hoping to use a specific database, cloud provider, or blockchain. They want a product that works. They want speed, reliability, security, transparency, and global accessibility. If blockchain can deliver those things better than existing systems, people will use products powered by it without ever thinking about the underlying technology. That is what real adoption looks like. The World Cup is one of the largest sporting events on earth. Millions of fans from around the world are interacting with a ticketing system powered by Avalanche. Most of them will never know or care what blockchain is running underneath. And honestly, that is a good thing. The future of this industry will not be determined by how many people talk about blockchains. It will be determined by how many businesses quietly put it to work solving real problems for real customers. Ticketing. Payments. Financial services. Loyalty. Gaming. Identity. The biggest winners will not necessarily be the chains that generate the most headlines. They will be the ones powering experiences that people use every day without realizing it. That is exactly why Avalanche has aligned around a simple idea: Technology Built for Business. Not technology built for speculation. Not technology built for press releases. Technology built to solve real problems for real organizations serving real customers at global scale. When people ask what blockchain is good for, they often imagine some future use case that has not arrived yet. The reality is that it is already happening. Right now, thousands of FIFA World Cup ticket transactions are settling on Avalanche. That feels a lot closer to the future than most people realize. 🔺⚽️

Japan’s ~$1.6T government bond repo market is the next frontier for onchain finance. Progmat, Japan’s largest tokenized securities platform and a dedicated Avalanche L1 builder, is leading this study on tokenized JGBs, stablecoin settlement, and onchain repo infrastructure for commercial use in Japan. 👇