Avalanche

Avalanche is a decentralized, open-source platform for launching and managing digital assets and decentralized applications. It was designed to improve the scalability, efficiency, security, and decentralization of cryptocurrency networks. Avalanche provides an array of blockchain services including transactions with near-instant settlement, high transaction throughput, asset issuance and exchange, innovative stake/vote delegation-based consensus mechanism, as well as on-chain programming language support.

Another point of difference between Avalanche and other cryptocurrencies is its focus on sharding technology, or so-called "Avax Subnets". Sharding or "sub-netting" enables parallel processing that greatly improves processing times and transaction speeds. Ultimately, this allows users to transfer tokens much faster when compared to monolithic blockchains.

Avalanche network also has low energy consumption, compared to Proof of Work blockchains, as there is no "number crunching" mining necessary to maintain consensus across the network nodes.