Ava Labs CEO and founder Emin Gün Sirer says the blockchain industry has matured beyond its experimental roots and that Avalanche's biggest advantage is combining speed, scalability and security without compromise.
Speaking with James Heckman, founder of RTB Digital and publisher of TheStreet Roundtable , and Aly Madhavji, managing partner at Blockchain Founders Fund, Sirer broke down Avalanche's design philosophy in a way even "a father on a golf course in Arizona" could understand.
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"Talk to my father who's at a golf course in Arizona who has never heard of Avalanche, doesn't know what proof-of-stake or any of this," Heckman told him. "How about the, what do you do?"
"We make decisions under a second"
"I see," Sirer replied. "Let's see. Avalanche sets itself apart from all of the other systems out there by being one of the fastest, lowest-latency, and most flexible platforms out there. There are two components to what makes it so fast."
He explained that at the heart of every blockchain lies a consensus protocol — "a set of algorithms that make sure the network as a whole tracks everybody's accounts, everybody's ledgers, how much money you've got, what tokens you send to whom."
Download Roundtable app on App Store or Google Play Store to watch the full, uncut interview.
Sirer contrasted Avalanche's model with Bitcoin's energy-intensive mining and older "classical protocols" where "machines talk to each other like senators in a Senate."
"Prior to Avalanche, all of the protocols involved all of the senators, all of the validators talking to all the others. And so that doesn't scale," he said.
Related: What is blockchain? Explained
"The big breakthrough behind Avalanche is a consensus protocol where a group of entities can make a decision even with bad participants inside the Senate, even with evil actors inside the Senate, without having to talk to every other member of that Senate. That means we can make decisions under a second, whereas for Solana it's about 12.8 seconds, whereas for Ethereum it's two and a half minutes."
Download Roundtable app on App Store or Google Play Store to watch the full, uncut interview.
"The cost of our speed is not security"
Heckman then asked the natural follow-up: "What's the cost of your speed?"
Sirer didn't hesitate.
"The cost of our speed is… and security. It's… security is not one of them," he said. "We do one thing that Bitcoin also does, which is the guarantee that we provide is probabilistic."
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He added that Avalanche's security remains on par with Bitcoin's:
"People criticized Satoshi for providing a probabilistic guarantee that it's not 100 percent. And Satoshi's response was, look, you're operating on chips that also are probabilistically correct. They miscompute every now and then as well. He had done the math to make sure the probability of a miscompute is so insanely small that it's not worth worrying about. We can make the probability so, so, so, so small that the corresponding speedup is essentially for free."
Related: What is Crypto? Cryptocurrency explained
"Like the base of your house"
Madhavji, whose fund has invested in more than 200 blockchain startups, described Avalanche as "that underlying infrastructure layer."
"It's almost like the base of your house," he said. "Then you've got these apps that are built on top of it — think Facebook or other types of products consumers use directly."
He added that many of his portfolio companies are building on Avalanche because "it's faster, because it's extremely cheap."
Download Roundtable app on App Store or Google Play Store to watch the full, uncut interview.
"I still remember the early days," Madhavji said. "When you used Ethereum, sometimes it would just be very busy and it might actually take six hours to even send a transaction — or you might spend $600 or $1,000 just to do a simple transaction. There are stories where someone's trying to send $100 and might need to spend $1,000 on fees, which kills the point. Might as well use your bank."
Avalanche, he said, "has helped make this a lot better, faster, cheaper," with "the tooling so developers can actually very easily integrate this into their products."
Related: You don't just own data — you own power, says Ava Labs Exec
This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Oct 8, 2025, where it first appeared in the Innovation section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
