- The latest upgrade in Avalanche’s chain is called Granite.
- The upgrade includes three blockchain updates.
- Granite aims to make trading on Avalanche faster and cheaper.
Avalanche will activate Granite this week, an upgrade designed to speed up transactions on the $6.7 billion blockchain.
The upgrade aims to improve the operation of the blockchain under different transaction loads, allowing the time taken to complete transactions to be adjusted based on on-chain traffic.
Ava Labs executive Olivia Vande Woude said the upgrade could “reduce settlement time to less than two seconds,” in an October blog post.
Ava Labs is the developer behind the Avalanche blockchain.
Woude said such ultra-fast speed would make Avalanche a more efficient blockchain for institutional use cases where real-time chain finality is essential.
A bruised economy
This is a key moment for the six-year-old blockchain.
As the code becomes more precise, Avalanche enters this new upgrade with a bruised on-chain economy.
Avalanche has lost $1.4 billion in investor deposits over the past six weeks, according to DefiLlama data, and its on-chain economy now sits nearly 90% below its 2022 peak of $17.8 billion.
Wednesday, the The Granite upgrade will activate on Avalanche, introducing three updates to the blockchain designed to improve its speed and security.
One upgrade is how quickly the blockchain can adjust the time it takes to process transactions. Currently, such a change can only happen during on-chain upgrades, meaning Avalanche is limited to a maximum performance threshold.
With Granite, Avalanche will achieve dynamic transaction processing speeds that vary in response to user traffic.
The other two upgrades focus on reducing the costs of cross-chain transactions on blockchains built on Avalanche and introducing biometric data signing on Avalanche.
This latest feature is expected to introduce fingerprint, facial, and other biometric identity verification to Avalanche. This will allow users, especially those using mobile devices, to initiate transactions on the blockchain using biometric data.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our DeFi correspondent based in Nigeria. It covers DeFi and technology. Do you have any advice? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.
