What is Avian Network? - Projects history and long-term goals
This blog explains summarized entirety of the projects story to present day, explaining how it started, and what’s the actual mission of Avian.
The Genesis of Avian: From Ravencoin Lite to Flight
Avian’s journey began under a different name: Ravencoin Lite. Back on September 01, 2021, a launch was announced on Bitcointalk forum, marking the birth of the project. By making a post on bitcointalk forum, mining / starting of the chain was announced in advance on exact date and time. Making it a fair launch https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5357782.0
Fair launch means anyone can participate right from beginning, there is no presale of coin & there is no pre-mine done by the team. Anyone has the fairground to start from 0. Each community member, team or not has equal chance of participating in block production and earning of the coin.
History of technology — Events before Avian:
Avian, initially known as Ravencoin Lite, emerged from the fusion of Bitcoin’s codebase and native on-chain assets made by Ravencoin. Ravencoin, faced community discontent due to increased usage cost, being overall slow and not scalable with no further developments made. An attempt to address these issues — Ravencoin Classic — failed, as it was made and exploited by Chinese ASIC firms to capitalize on the community's demand. From the remnants of that community and codebase, Avian took flight. Its mission? To retain Bitcoin’s core qualities (secure consensus, core integration, proof of work issuance, UTXO account model etc.) combined with Ravencoins native on-chain assets approach. Avian aimed for speed, cost efficiency, decentralization, and constant development. First name Ravencoin Lite was Inspired by how projects were named through blockchain history, for example Litecoin.
Advancements made by Avian: Empowering the Community
Avian’s journey involved critical enhancements, each aimed at creating a more robust and community-driven blockchain:
1. ASIC Resistance: Avian took a bold step by making its entire chain ASIC-resistant. This move leveled the playing field, ensuring that mining power remained in the hands of individual miners rather than centralized entities.
2. Speed and Efficiency: Avian optimized its project to process blocks and transactions twice as fast as Ravencoin. This efficiency boost not only improved user experience but also enhanced overall network performance.
3. Dual Mining Approach: To decentralize hashrate and encourage broader participation, Avian introduced dual mining support. By accommodating both CPU and GPU algorithms, it opened the doors to a wider audience of miners, reinforcing the network’s security, by blocks being processed 50% by gpus 50% by cpus.
4. Asset Integration: Avian completed the integration of native assets, aligning with Ravencoin’s. Now, users could seamlessly reflect their assets on the Avian blockchain, much faster, at a fraction of the cost fostering a vibrant ecosystem.
The Avian Rebrand: A Name Takes Flight
- Rebranding happened where nothing but a name was changed from Ravencoin Lite to Avian, with goal to further differentiate the project from Ravencoin, as we are looking to build and further expand, essentially making ravencoin non relevant in the name. RVL — AVN Rebrand Release Date: November 30, 2021. New Bitcointalk forum post was made, addressing the name change: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5377648.msg58757105#msg58757105
Next big improvements (worked on):
5. SMART CONTRACTS: improvement that is still in the works is brining smart contracts availability which will enable automation on a on-chain level and enable creation of de fi projects, applications, with more things other than assets issued on the native on-chain platform.
6. BLOCKDAG: improvement that is planned, is implementing Kaspa blockdag solution, which solved the blockchain trilemma of scalability, security & decentralization. Such upgrade would enable faster block times, to the point of handling more transactions and usability without affecting the decentralization or security, enabling large processing power and scaling while staying true to bitcoins consensus & rules with no tradeoffs.
Avian’s goal is to keep improving, and forever be centered around community, usability, cost efficiency to create a sustainable fully decentralized platform for community to build and utilize.
Team keeps on working on building more infrastructure & integrations to make usability and availability easier for everyone, alongside looking to further improve the fundamentals wherever possible.
Last change, made 1 and a half years after the launch:
In a community and on-chain consensus vote, 5% developer block reward was added to help with funding infrastructure upkeep and new projects expansion developments. The reward comes after each block, so it will be gradually available to the team. The development fund serves to pay out rewards to individual contributors & to be used as payment to keep the community infrastructure online, such as: main website, asset marketplace, api servers, solus explorer, iquidus explorer, trezor explorer, asset explorer, electrum wallet, chrome extension, web wallet & other necessary servers.
Bigger expenses like exchange listings, would be community fundraised, with goal to do so only for a top tier trusted exchange.
Team structure:
Team is consisting of initial volunteers, who helped make the project be where it is today with constant work for over last 3 years.
Team is open for new developers, who can join as volunteers, where eventually a developer that contributes a lot to the project can be included in the official core team.
Even if you are artist, writer, content creator, or have certain skills that you would like to contribute to any aspect of the project with, you can feel free to sign up as volunteer on our discord server. Volunteers will be presented with tasks, that core team would designate to complete, but volunteers can also act on their own, make work proposals, or do things to help the project in their own ways. There is no special permission needed to write, create content, design things or build on Avian. Core team would help out, in case of any information or cooperation needed and no effort will be ignored or go under unnoticed!