Athereum

Basics

• From EthHub Weekly #83 (15-10-2019):

"AVA Labs Announces Athereum

Athereum is a “spoon”, or friendly fork, of Ethereum, which benefits from the Avalanche consensus protocol and applications in the Ethereum ecosystem"

• From their website (as of 3-12-2019)

"The only new thing is the backend consensus engine. Instead of longest chain proof-of-work, Athereum uses a staking-based linear chain version of the Avalanche consensus protocol."

• Had a AMA in which quite some questions (11-2019) were highly critical. Most comments were about AVA Labs being insincere and complaining about the terminology 'gift' and 'friendly'. They instead saw ATH as a Trojan Horse to attract ETH users towards AVA.

Tech

• From the AMA (11-2019):

"Snowman consensus, which is used in Athereum, is an asynchronous consensus protocol. In Athereum, there is no minimum block time. This means that Athereum can process transactions as fast as the EVM/database can support. With our current tests, this puts the number around 200-300 tps. However, we have found some places in go-ethereum (which was the basis of the Athereum subnet) which might be able to boost that quite a bit higher. However, that is still a work in progress. The block sizes in Athereum are not changed from the Ethereum's sizes.

For your question about the minimum AVA amount to stake: this is controlled via an on-chain governance mechanism. However, the only purpose of having a minimum amount is to prevent a DoS point on the network. One of the amazing benefits of using Snowman-based consensus, is that we do not need to limit the size of the staking set to achieve fast consensus."

Somewhere further:

"In regards to staking amount, it should be < $5k."

The claims of 200-300 tps were disputed in the comment section.

"This is very misleading. If you ran Athereum at 20 times the current gas limit, most nodes would not be able to keep up; if they had an outage they'd never be able to catch up, and the state would rapidly grow to the point that it would be impractically large."

And countered with:

"I'm sorry, have you tried running this test on our network? You can issue transactions, to the live demo network at ~200 tps. From the theoretical maximums side, we have benchmarked a ~3k tps chain implementation. The bottleneck in our chain implementation (which to be clear, is not running the EVM just simple payment transactions) is in signature verification."

Comparing it with Eth 2.0:

"Athereum uses the AVA layer 0 consensus protocol. There's no sharding in Athereum. We do not require things like beacon chains, and we are completely asynchronous. There's likely faster finality on the Avalanche network, and our throughput choke point is how fast 80% of the staked validators can process transactions. Longest Chain has throughput restrictions by virtue of block size and also the requirement for confirmations."

• There is currently one Athereum client, which is a plugin to the golang implementation of Ava.

Subnet of Avalanche (AVA)

• The team claims not to mint any ATH themselves: "We are not planning to mint any coins for ourselves -- the primary benefit to us is that ATH helps us launch our network (AVA) with a great, legally compliant use case. "
• "We want Athereum will be the first major subnet deployment on the Ava platform! Indeed we are hoping the greater Ethereum community takes this as an opportunity to test and improving the infrastructure. There have actually already been some conversations sparked from Athereum about performance improvements in the EVM!"