Where did Avalanche come from?

A team of pseudonymous developers calling themselves Team Rocket first shared the foundational ideas for Avalanche in a white paper on a file-sharing platform in 2018. Not long after, a research team at Cornell University, led by computer scientist Emin Gün Sirer, built on these ideas, culminating in the launch of Avalanche in 2020. 

Sirer and his team of doctoral candidates, including Ted Yin and Kevin Sekniqi, founded Ava Labs later the same year to focus on building and scaling Avalanche. Their expressed goal was to establish it as the cryptocurrency network of choice for companies that want to launch products in web3. 

Sirer is a well-known contributor to cryptocurrency. A long-time professor of computer science at Cornell University, he created a cryptocurrency called Karma in 2003, six years before the creation of Bitcoin. Karma was intended as a peer-to-peer file sharing network and used proof of work to verify transactions.