Avalanche's Infinite Highway: Scaling to 1,000+ Custom Blockchains with John Nahas at KBW 2025

to the stage with a big round of applause.

Good afternoon everybody. It's great to be back in Korea. It's my third Korea blockchain week and especially to be on this BAX Woo Bank stage. As you mostly know, a week ago or so, BAX in collaboration with Woo Bank launched the first Korean one stable coin KRW1 on Avalanche. So, we've been very active in the Korean marketplace for several years with SK Planet with Nexon's Maple Store Universe and so much more.

But what I want to talk to you about today is kind of the way we look at the world. And what I want you to do is to kind of stop and forget everything that you've thought about or known for block about blockchains up until this point. The reason being we have seen over the course of the past 10, 15 years technological improvements, first generation, second generation, third generation blockchains that are faster, that are cheaper, that are more scalable with a little bit of a change or new virtual machines. After the birth of the EVM, we saw the Salana virtual machine and the move virtual machine and so many other virtual machines will continue to come. However, the problem is we're still stuck in a first generation business plan.

And that's the worldview that most of you have. And that worldview is a single chain. Our the problem though that we have in this industry is that there's simply just too many blockchains and there's too much block space. Every six months or so, a new group or new family of blockchains emerge. And the problem with these is that they are all generalpurpose blockchains.

Their product is their token. They use that token to go find users and use cases and something to be relevant and after some time they fade into irrelevance. How many real layer 1 blockchains have actually had traction aside from Ethereum, Salana, Avalanche and a very few others that have continued to do so? General purpose blockchains have shared block space. So we are to assume that equities and and payments and identity and government and DeFi and NFTTS and everything else is going to live on one single infrastructure layer.

These general purpose chains are searching for users and use cases, right? They they're they're not built for anything specific. These remind me of AOL. For this is an American centric uh reference, but for those of you that are old enough to remember AOL in the early days of the internet, particularly in the US, you would use your dialup internet and you would go online and this is what it looked like. So on one page, you had your email, your calendar, your chat, your sports, your travel, your this, your everything on one page, right?

Because it was a catchall for everything that you could do online. Well, doesn't this sound like what we have today with new blockchains where you go to one blockchain where you can do everything onchain in that ecosystem doesn't really solve what we're trying to do here. And we are 15 years into this experiment with this technology and we still don't have mass global adoption. We don't have applications with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users. We don't even have hundreds of millions of users on chain today.

This is kind of this the setup, right? The legacy systems, obviously I'm referring to Ethereum here, is what started everything. And we love the EVM and we love what the EVM allowed for after after Bitcoin with smart contracts and everything else, but it wasn't built to scale because they didn't know what they were building for 10 plus years ago or however long ago it was, right? So, you have the L1 at the bottom with L2s on top for execution and now we're hearing about L3s and maybe L4s. That's an inverted pyramid.

That's too much pressure on the bottom. And if any part of that chain breaks, the whole thing doesn't work, right? So that that's not the solution. We saw L2s for the greater part of the last year gain market share because it was safe to be aligned with Ethereum and the the you know the life of Ethereum has been a long time and it's had uptime and all these great things, but it's just not built to scale. The current solution is the one big pipe.

This is what I like to call it. This is your salon, your move VMs, the everex expanding pipe that puts everything through it. But again, this is an institutional stage. Institutions, enterprises, governments, DeFi, fintech, payments, all the world's financial use cases don't live in one pipe. That's not the way the world is built.

We believe with Avalanche a different way. We believe in an infinite highway. We have our own EVM public permissionless chain. That's the C chain where all the liquidity lives and all the assets live. But then you could continuously add more chains alongside of it that have interoperability and a million other things.

These are purpose-built chains, right? Every other general purpose blockchain is a solution in search of a problem that says build your business, put your asset or your use case on my blockchain. That's backwards. The blockchain should enable your asset, your business, your compliance, your jurisdiction needs to make the best product possible, the best business possible, right? What Worry Bank needs is different than what JP Morgan needs, which is different than a bank in the Middle East and anywhere else.

So why does the chain not have compliance and jurisdictional requirements and business requirements built into it? This model is infinitely scalable. You can just keep adding more and more chains alongside each other. And as we'll talk about in a little bit, they're fully customizable. Again, your chain for your needs.

This is what Avalanche currently looks like. There's about 70 L1s or Avalanche blockchains live on mainet. We have over a 100 left on testnet. We're looking at over 200 plus by next year and hopefully up to a thousand. And then we continuously grow the network.

So counterintuitively my solution to the problem of too many blockchains and too much block space is more blockchains and more block space but application specific purposebuilt layer ones for your jurisdiction for your compliance for your asset for your business use case a technology that serves the business not the other way around and those are avalanche all's been following the avalanch story for years. We used to call these subnets because they are a subnet network of validators running their own chain. Well, we did something called rebranding and we changed it to what they effectively have always been. They are layer 1 sovereign blockchains. Ethereum has layer twos.

You're building it on top. With Avalanche at layer 1, you're building alongside of it. So, your layer 1 is its own layer 1, just like people have used the Cosmos SDK in the past, but with a lot more features and a lot more benefits. To me, this reminds me of WordPress. 20 years ago, if you asked me or anybody, do you want a website?

Someone would look at you and say, I'm not a bank. I'm not a university. I'm not an enterprise. Why would I have a website? Right?

Until WordPress came along and made it very easy to launch websites. And we take for granted how easy it is now to launch a website. Any creator, any business, anybody, anywhere can launch a website in minutes. Well, why not the same for blockchains? Now, don't get me wrong, AOL was great.

A lot of people made a lot of money on a with AOL. A lot of AOL brought a lot of people online, but that was step one to bringing people online. And general purpose chains have been great for step one, bringing people on chain. But if we're going to go from 1 to 10 or 10 to 100 and really grow global adoption of this technology and these use cases, we need more blockchains. And the world of Avalanche L1's is different because it's not the same EVM cookie cutter chain over and over again.

It's the chain that fits your use cases. So we have private permission chains. These are permissions that the validator set. You get to decide who runs your network and private users. We've seen this with governments.

We've seen this with institutions that want their private instance. This is usually the people that use your hyperledger or your quarter or things of that nature. We have permission public. Enterprises run their own nodes in their chain, but anybody can use it. This is what this is what a lot of Korean conglomerates have have opted to use over the past few years.

SK Planet used this for their UPTN chain. Nexon's Maple Store Universe and their Nexus chain is a permission public chain. They run the chain. Anybody can use it. And then of course public permission list.

This is what we're very familiar with with crypto chains, cryptonative chains. But the cryptonative public permission list is often times the innovation that brings the private permission over. And with Avalanche, you can start private permission or you could start permission public and move more permissionless or more public as time goes on or as regulations get better, but you can come on chain in a compliant way. So great, I'm talking about all these layer 1 blockchains and you can launch layer 1 blockchains. And you're thinking to yourself, this sounds like a lot, right?

People have a hard time sometimes even just launching a DAP. And now I'm talking about launching blockchains, right? But Avalanche has taken years of distributed systems in computer science and really allowed for this proliferation of purpose-built specific use case blockchains because Avalanche L1's first and foremost are interoperable. And this is on two levels. one, if you launch an Avalanche L1, whether it's private or permissioned or public or whatever, you have the interoperability with the Cchain, which is our public chain.

So, if you're launching a Korean uh payments network on your private chain, but you want the Korean one stable coin when it goes live, that's going to go live on the Cchain. So, any asset that sits on the Cchain can be moved to your chain for your use case. So, you don't have to go to Circle for USDC and Tether for USDT. You can pull it directly from the Cchain. If you have a token on your L1, you don't have to go to exchanges in Korea.

You're not going to go to Bit Thumb and up it and say, "Please index my chain and add my chain and support the infrastructure." All the work we've done to get the Cchain supported by global wallets and exchanges and infrastructure providers flow through to your layer 1 blockchain. So if you have a layer 1, regardless of what the virtual machine is, your token can sit on the C chain and get listed as an ERC20 along with everybody else. So you have the interoperability with all of the assets and all of the liquidity and the oracles and everything else on the Cchain. But then you also have interoperability between Avalanche ones.

So if five or six Korean banks launched each of them their own private permission chain, well those private permission chains can talk to each other and decide not to talk to anybody else. This is kind of recreating the the existing financial royals but on chain right around the world you have Fedwire and SEPA and Swift and all of these incumbent legacy systems. You could put you could recreate these onchain. The same with payment networks and merchant payment networks. different people and different enterprises could use their own validators and run everything together.

So you could start to imagine a world with hundreds if not thousands and tens of thousands of chains with their own rules, who they talk to, who they don't talk to. You know, you can have a Korean chain that doesn't touch US assets, but only works with Korean assets. You can work with other industries and whatever it may be. We have a chain for FIFA right now that's launching. Well, that chain is going to allow for assets to be traded on the Avalanche Cchain, but in the future could work with other sports or loyalty or ticketing applications that sit on their own L1's.

Avalanche L1's are also sovereign. They're safe and secure. You don't have to worry about anything else affecting your chain. If there's congestion because of an NFT drop or anything else, that doesn't affect you. If another chain goes down, that doesn't affect you.

If there is a delay or anything else happening anywhere else in the network, it doesn't affect you. You have the safety and security of running your own L1, but with the interoperability of being connected to an to a network of other layer 1 blockchains as well. Also, they're inexpensive. And I purposfully here am not using the word cheap. We often like to say the word cheap.

Things are cheap. there. You know, it's a cheaper version of its semantics, but things that are cheap by definition are cheap. They don't always work so well. Things that are cheap have reorgs.

Things that are cheap have downtime. Things that are cheap, you are sacrificing something for something else. I am saying they're inexpensive in two ways. one, if you want to have it because you're not beholden to network activity that is not on your chain, you don't have to worry about gas fees and spikes and things of that nature because of an NFT drop or a memecoin drop or DeFi activity or whatever else. You have your own chain with your own bandwidth to do whatever it is that you want on there.

Secondly, it's not that expensive to launch an avalanche on one, right? You hear about all these new layer one blockchains that are launching that have broken some technological barrier or whatever they're doing. They have 50 60 people launching a chain. Well, it takes a lot of work to build a chain. It takes a lot of work to launch a chain.

And what people take for granted is it takes a lot of work to maintain a blockchain. The team at Ava Labs has helped streamline this and bring this to market in a fast way. At Ava Labs, we have Ava Cloud, which allows you to spin up and launch a blockchain in minutes if you want, but you can be customizable. We work with thirdparty partners like Zeve and Kido and many others who also allow you to launch an Avalanche L1. You can launch an Avalanche L1 and have it managed for a few thousand a month.

That's as cheap, if not cheaper, than a cloud bill for your own blockchain with your own rules, for your own business. So, if you're a startup founder who's doing something really cool and you're like, I could really use a blockchain for this, this is not cost prohibitive anymore. It's not that wildly expensive to say, I'm going to launch a blockchain. So, when you see these guys raising $500 million to build a brand new blockchain, they they really they really don't need to, right? It's it's you you can you can uh determine where I'm going with that, right?

But you can do this and it's and it's inexpensive and it should be because to proliferate the use and adoption of this technology we need to make it inexpensive and we need to allow anybody who needs this technology the ability to use it. They are also faster these L1s because they are segregated are not dealing with anything else. We had the Cchain which was our EVM but we worked a lot to perfect the speed of these L1s and those lessons that we were we took from Avalanche L1's we took back to the Cchain and made it even faster. So it's a virtuous cycle of com of speed getting better and better and better. Right now, the Avalanche Cchain and Avalanche L1's are by far the most decentralized, fast, fastest, and most inexpensive EVM opportunities options out there for any builder.

Avalanche, because of the Avalanche consensus, has subsecond finality. There's no reorgs. There's no 15minute delays. There's no centralized sequencers. There's nothing in between your transactions going through in less than a second on any chain across the entire network or between chains.

You want to do a swap from one L1 to another, that's going to happen in less than a second. And finally, Avalanche L1's are customizable. Your business, your asset, your jurisdiction, your compliance, whatever your business is, needs a technology that supports the business. And that means customizable a across the entire thing. If you are a Korean bank that may or may not be wanting to launch a layer 1 and you require that all of the nodes of your a layer 1 blockchain are in the Republic of South Korea, you can do that.

We're doing this in Saudi Arabia with the monetary authority of Saudi Arabia where a conglome a group of banks a syndicate of banks are doing finance onchain with nodes in the country. You can also do that here. Titan, a new a new K-pop uh layer 1 blockchain that just launched this week is with at heart is the new uh group there and they have many more groups coming are going to do loyalty and rewards and payments and ticketing and a million other things on their Avalanche L1 that is gasless. No gas, no need to have the native token. The blockchain just enables the business in the best way the business can can succeed without the limitations of the tech.

The tech enables the business and the use case that you need without having to jump through all these extra hoops. So if you want a gas token, you can have one. If you don't, you don't need it. You want your own governance token, you can do it. You want to use the EVM?

Sure. You want to use another V VM, go ahead. In 5 years from now, the EVM may be extinct. The SVM may be extinct. There might be new VMs.

Well, guess what? You could spin up a new chain with a new VM. You could build the blockchain that you want. And if you don't believe me, you can go to avocloud.com right now and within five minutes have a a blockchain launched on testnet.

It's that easy. So effectively what I've been trying to say is that we've been looking at this world in a first generation lens. And that to me is the end of the beginning. This is that was the 0ero to one moment that we've had that we've recreated over and over and over again with all of these new great fast quick cheap blockchains for years. But that hasn't gotten us to global adoption.

That hasn't gotten this technology to be adopted as much as possible. And now Asia has always been leading. I've been coming to Korea for four years. People here understand the technology and they understand what it's possible. And for the last four years in the United States, we were restricted.

But now we are catching up in the west to the the innovation that's been happening here in the east. So we are at a pivotal point. We are at a pivotal point where enterprises and institutions and governments and startups can all use this technology to bring real assets on chain to real to really bring real innovation on chain and to show what blockchain technology is really capable of. So we believe we are at the forefront of this next chapter. It is the end of the beginning but we're really looking forward to the next chapter and everything else that has that comes with it.

So thank you for your time and uh we appreciate all your support. Well, thank you John for your fantastic presentation.