Avalanche Announces First Major Upgrade, Unveils New Features

On November 13, Avalanche revealed that it will be launching its first major upgrade next month, and claimed it will advance the blockchain field and disprove commonly held beliefs about the industry.

According to the announcement, the Apricot upgrade will allow the Avalanche blockchain to achieve total immutable finality in under a second, and clear transactions at 3 times the speed of the centralized VISA network.

One of the major features included in the upgrade is “verifiable pruning,” which will help compact past transactions and enable nodes to bootstrap and come online quickly, regardless of the transactions’ history or the size of the chain. With this, clients will be able to connect to the platform without having to download the entire blockchain.

Another big innovation that Apricot will be bringing to the crypto field is a new fee mechanism. The mechanism will lower transaction costs and make them predictable. The platform will also implement a governance feature, which AVAX holders will be able to use to vote on integral economic parameters.

The Ava Labs team stated that they believe in “constant, rapid iteration and enhancements that unlock new use cases and functionalities,” which cannot be found on other chains. They have also expressed their intention to continue building on the starting achievements of the platform, and further the process of “constant refinement” throughout its future development.

Another implementation is the new asset type called “Freezable Assets,” which will enable asset creators and issuers to freeze and unfreeze assets on the platform. This new functionality is created with the idea of providing organizations with regulated use cases, by being a key component of existing and new assets coming soon to Avalanche.

Lastly, Ava Labs will be introducing support for “Avalanche Native Asset ERC-20”. A new Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) instruction called “callex” will allow the Avalanche Contract Chain (C-Chain) to transfer native Avalanche Assets while invoking smart contracts, which will also enable native assets to be deposited into ERC-20 wrapper contracts.

Apricot will be undergoing extensive testing before its release on the mainnet to ensure that the upgrade process is smooth and does not impact existing functionality. Ava Labs’ engineering team stated that they will refine the upgrade over the next few weeks and keep everyone updated on their progress, and also engage in conversations with the community to discuss rollout schedules and set specific dates.