“The sky's the limit in terms of how these subnetworks can be constructed.”

That’s Emin Gün Sirer, CEO of AVA Labs and associate professor at Cornell University. Sirer is talking about his soon-to-be-launched proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, Ava.

“[Ava] is almost feature-complete with [its own] codebase. We’re hoping to go public with a testnet soon, within the next month and mainnet sometime between December and February,” said Sirer.

Ava will be comprised of multiple different “subnetworks” able to be uniquely coded to support different types of decentralized applications (dapps).

“Part of the interesting aspect of the Ava platform is that it gives you a very modular infrastructure for developing any kind of functionality you want,” said Kevin Sekniqi, chief protocol architect at Ava Labs. “When you launch a chain on Ava, you get this blank state where you can import any additional functionality like the ethereum virtual machine."

As Sirer suggests, these independent blockchain worlds can be coded to host unique privacy guarantees, be compliant with regional laws, or fulfill specific data storage requirements.

Such flexibility is what differentiates the platform from other blockchains that have come before it.

“[Ava] is top of its class and it’s going to show the world exactly what this [blockchain] space needs,” said Sirer.

While affirming that proof-of-stake was the superior consensus protocol, Sirer added that Ava is in a class of its own.

“All of these PoS protocols that have been proposed today rely on the same foundation and that foundation has been poorly specified. It has many shortcomings compared to what PoW gives you out of the box,” said Sirer, adding:

Emin Gün Sirer image via YouTube