John Nahas - Reimagining Blockchains - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Good afternoon everybody. It's good to be with you today. It's good to be back in Dubai especially uh not in a flood like last year. But wanted to talk to you guys today about kind of where we see at Avala Labs the world. Avala Labs is the team behind the Avalanche network supporting the growth of the network.

But I want to level set with everybody. I think what we've been hearing about I'm sure for the last uh two days here and we continuously hear about are first and second and third generation blockchains. We hear about how the technology is improving, how there's consistent development and innovation and growth on the technical front. But I would make the argument and I think we look at the world in a way in which this industry is still stuck in a first generation business model. The problem that we have nowadays is that there are simply too many blockchains and there's too much block space.

Just this week, I think we've heard about six new layer ones that are coming out. The problem with these blockchains is that they are all general purpose. They are intended to solve every problem, fit every application and every use case. Let's be very serious. Their product simply is their token.

They use that token to then go find developers and users. This has been the business model that has been repeated over and over and over again by many different ecosystems and fundamentally you are sharing block space with other applications and other assets and other things that may have nothing to do with your core business and with your core competency. If I was to think back, I am a little I'm 40 years old to an earlier day and this is going to be a US- ccentric vision. This is what general purpose blockchains remind me of. If you were from the US or maybe even not, you would remember that in the early 90s there was AOL.

You would dial up to use the internet and you would get one screen. It was a welcome page. But that's what the early days of the internet were. You had email, you had chat, you had personal finance, you had commerce and shopping, you had uh sports and media, everything on one page and that would let you access. This is kind of what general purpose blockchains look like today in a different form, in a different fashion, with a different technology, but effectively it's the same experience.

the current state of blockchain technology. We're very grateful to our friends at Ethereum, but they were not intending for a world that needed to scale to where we are today. So, you have the layer 1 and now we're hearing that they want to improve the layer 1, which is fantastic, but the layer 2 is supposed to be the general purpose execution layer. Now, layer 3es are application specific, and we're even hearing about layer fours that are asset specific. That's an inverted pyramid.

And even the layer 2 side keeps going out. It's not really scalable. Where we are today and where everybody's been focusing is the one big pipe. One massive monolithic fast chain that's cheap that you just shove everything through. And optimizations are being made to make these faster and cheaper.

But that pipe infinitely gets bigger and everything is supposed to go down the middle. Avalanche looks at the world differently. We do have our one big pipe that is our C chain. That is probably what most of you are familiar with with Avalanche. It's an EVM public permissionless chain.

But it the network is more than that. Avalanche is a network of layer 1 chains and we look at it as a highway. You have our one big pipe with many alongside it that can infinitely scale to many L1s. So I said that too many blockchains and too much block space was the problem. My solution is more blockchains and more block space but purpose-built.

We need to shift away from this tech first innovation on tech first mentality where we just keep putting the infrastructure at the front and we don't allow the products and the assets and the use cases to really shine. This industry has been doing things backwards by putting the blockchain front because that's what helps the ecosystem. That's what helps the token. We are not driving innovation. We are not driving adoption.

We are just driving the same circle over and over again and going through more more and more of the same users and more and more of the same things. Our solution for that is avalanche L1's. If you have been following the ecosystem, this used to be called these used to be called subnetss. A subnet network of validators in the avalanche ecosystem running their own chain. Avalanche L1s are the solution to the general purpose blockchain problem that we're dealing with.

Our focus is launching businesses and products that work. With Avalanche L1's, the focus is the business. Your business, your chain, your application, your chain, your jurisdiction, your compliance requirements, whatever it may be, your chain. We have it backwards right now. Your application, our chain, your use case, our chain.

It's all about the our chain with the general purpose chains. When in reality, we should be proliferating purpose-built blockchains that have interoperability that are infinitely scalable and are fully customizable. The Avalanche Cchain is an EVM chain. Many of the 60 chains that we have live now and the 37 of those that have that are product live are EVM chains. The 100 plus we have on testn net are EVM chains.

But Avalanche can also support Salana virtual machine chains and move virtual machine chains and virtual machines of the future that will be coming out and have interoperability between those all working together. I said general purpose blockchains remind me of AOL. Avalanche L1's and Avalanche as a network of blockchains reminds me of WordPress. 20 years ago, if you asked anybody if they wanted their own website, they would look at you like you were crazy. Like you're probably looking at me now telling you that everybody should have their own blockchain.

But 20 years ago, you would say, "I'm not a bank. I'm not a university. I'm not an institution. Why would I need a a website?" We take this for granted today that any small business can spin up a website.

Any person can spin up a website and be an influencer and create their own personal brand and personal economy. WordPress allowed for this. And in that same way, Avalanche will allow for the proliferation of custombuilt application specific business specific blockchains for whatever the use cases are. What do these look like? We kind of break these down into three different kinds and this is kind of how you see a network of interoperable chains working together.

First you have permission private chains. These are permissioned at the validator set meaning those who run it allow others that they want to run the network. And the user base is also permission. This could be KYC, this could be compliance, this could be jurisdiction based, it could be customer base, it could be whatever you want it to be. We are seeing adoption here and usage by governments, by institutions, primarily regulated financial institutions and for regulated assets.

If it's for securities or whatever it may be, this is what's being used now. Historically, these were your hyperledgers and your enterprise chains that never really worked. Well, why did they not work? They worked because they lived in a vacuum. They had no interoperability with other chains, with other assets, with innovation that's happening in a broader ecosystem.

Second, you have permission public chains. These are permissioned at the validator set open for anybody to use. This is what we've been seeing over at Avalanche with gaming with off the grid and with Nexon's Maple Story universe coming. Companies run their own chains and let anybody use it. We're going to see that we see this with payments as well.

You want an open ecosystem for anybody to use and transact. But depending on the use case, you might need to control the validator set. And then finally, and most recently, we've we've opened up the ability to launch public permissionless chains. This is what most of us that are cryptonative are used to. This is what people traditionally would use the Cosmos SDK for.

This is cryptonative open innovation. Run your own validators, run your own chain. Anyone can use it. This is the innovation hub, right? We have seen this with DeFi influencing traditional finance.

We see this also influencing the permission guys. Now you might say, you know, this is not in the ethos of of crypto to have some things maybe permissioned or maybe not. Frankly, if we want adoption, some people need to crawl before they walk before they run. You could look at the the incumbents as kind of crawling with private permission, but just because you start one way doesn't mean you stay that way. You could go from permission private to permission public to public permissionless depending on the change in governance and and compliance and legislation of whatever your jurisdiction is.

You have full customization and full ability to run the network that suits your business, your application, your asset or your use case. This is what the Avalanche ecosystem currently looks like right now. These are all validators running on the primary network. I'm proud to say that Avalanche is one of the most decentralized chains out there right now with one of the highest Nakamoto coefficients, a test of decentralization and is of course one of the most inexpensive uh EVMs out there as well. But these are the validators validating Avalanche and you could see some of these other ones with different colors.

Those are Avalanche L1's as well. So I mentioned we have 60 live more than 60 live of which 40 projects or so have gone to market. And we have over a hundred coming across all three of these verticals. But ultimately, right, you could say, "All right, John, you're talking about all these these chains. We have a ton of chains.

What's the difference?" Right? What makes Avalanche L1's different? There's a bunch of features that I think really transform the way things happen. Currently, we are very much reliant on third party bridges.

So, the most important thing, and I think the thing that comes to mind the most is Avalanche 01s are interoperable. So, if you're familiar with the Cchain, that is where liquidity lives. That is where you will find USDT and USDC and chain link oracles and every other tool that you may need or every other asset that you may need within the ecosystem. Now, you may say, I want to I want to launch my own payments chain. I'm a fintech that wants to launch a payments chain.

Do I have to go to Circle? You don't have to go to Circle. You pull USDC from the Cchain. Well, if you're a fintech L1 that maybe wants to talk to an a commerce or commercial L1 that's selling goods or whatever or services, you could swap USDC for their token or their asset between those chains. You have, thanks to interchain messaging on Avalanche, instant settlement between Avalanche L1's and Avalanche L1's and the Cchain.

So, the Cchain starts to become a liquidity and data hub for the broader ecosystem. All of these L1 tokens can be traded on the Cchain, can be deposited one day in a banky and borrowed against can be traded on a DEX. And if you are seeking an exchange list listing, you don't have to go and get your Avalanche L1 listed and integrated and indexed by an exchange. The Avalanche Cchain's already there. Vox is listed.

All of our Cchain tokens are listed on these exchanges. Your token will get listed just as an ERC20. Whether you use a Salana virtual machine, an EVM, or a move VM, your token will live on the Cchain as well as an ERC20 and get listed as easily as any ERC20 is listed without the complexity of having to do all of the tech work there. The Cchain really becomes the hub to the outside world, but also the trading hub amongst the entire ecosystem. Secondly, Avalanche L1's and Avalanche is very inexpensive.

I am purposefully not using the word cheap here because things that are cheap are cheap. You get what you pay for. They maybe work, they maybe don't. They maybe perform, they maybe don't. Avalanche is the most inexpensive EVM or truly decentralized EVM on the market.

The Cchain got dropped by 25x in last October and and another 95% recently. These optimizations have been brought to the Cchain because of the work we did optimizing Avalanche L1's. So you have the most highly performant EVM chains as avalanche L1's as well as the Cchain in in fact the Cchain is just another avalanche L1. It is just the primary network and the public one that everybody will use. They are also secure.

You can put the parameters that you want for your chain. I will actually use the word customizable. Do you want a gas token? You choose your own. You want no gas token, we've done that for SK Planet in Korea, you can have a gasless chain running.

You want the virtual machine of your choice, you can do that. You want to run nodes in a certain geography because that's what your compliance requirements ask of you, you can you can do that, too. Gone are the days where it used to be normal for you to fit your application, your asset, and your business onto a chain. You are not contorting yourself onto an existing infrastructure. It's the opposite.

The infrastructure is there and is customizable for you to build the chain that suits your business and your use case and your application. Also, these chains are sovereign. What happens on your chain does not affect any other chains. And what happens on any other chain does not affect your chain. A memecoin drop on the C chain will not affect your chain.

An NFT drop on another chain will not affect your chain. 5 million transactions on off the grid will not affect your chain. We're separating the workload. We're putting purpose-built use cases and applications that require their own chains on their own chains. But at the same time, we're giving the ability for people to launch chains in a fast and inexpensive manner.

You can go to avocacloud.io today and spin up a test net in 5 minutes. You can have a chain live in one day. You could start with your own blockchain for $3 to $5,000 a month. This used to sound crazy or not even realistic.

You needed a 30 person team of distributed systems engineers or god knows how much overhead to run a chain. That's what websites used to look like. We're changing that for blockchains. And of course, we're grateful to have partners such as Gelato coming on board to support Avalanche L1's and Zeve and Kido and many others that are be going to be coming because the economic benefits of an L1 are simply too much to ignore. The security benefits are better.

The customization is better than what you have currently on the L2 side. Finally, they're faster. As I mentioned, we are we are executing transactions on the Avalanche Cchain and on Avalanche L1's in a subsecond capacity. Often times the APIs and the applications that you are interacting with are slower than the chain itself. You have subsecond finality on your chain on every chain happening in real time on Avalanche.

You are executing transactions for a 25th of a cent and you are moving these across. We're very proud of the work the tesseract team has been doing. I urge you to go take a look at that. You can swap any token from any chain with another token on another chain near instantly. The vision of Avalanche is many chains that act and feel as one.

You should not know if you are swapping an in-game token with a sports memorabilia asset or a real world asset or a stable coin. You shouldn't know how many chains you're dealing with. You shouldn't have to think about connecting to different chains. You should just it should just act and feel as the internet. Just like you can move a file off of your desktop from one folder to another, you should be able to move an asset from one chain to another.

And that is not the current user experience that we have in crypto. We have these siloed ecosystems and that's not what the world is being built for. That's not the technology that's being built. It's being built for certain silos, for certain use cases, for general purpose blockchains and for their goals. Our goals are simple.

We are here to bring people onchain to bring businesses, assets, users, and adoption on chain. The era of general purpose chains with tokens being their product hopefully is coming, I think, to an end. That is the end of the first generation of blockchain business and we're really trying to bring the second generation of blockchain business with application business specific use cases with their own chains proliferating proliferating avalanche L1's across the board. Welcome to the journey. Hope to work with you guys.

Thank you.