{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0008","slug":"avalanche","title":"Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family","authors":"Team Rocket; later with Maofan Yin, Kevin Sekniqi, Robbert van Renesse and Emin Gün Sirer","year":2018,"date_label":"2018","publisher":"Team Rocket; later with Maofan Yin, Kevin Sekniqi, Robbert van Renesse and Emin Gün Sirer","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Consensus","topics":["Consensus"],"source_url":"https://www.avalabs.org/whitepapers","source_label":"Ava Labs white papers","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 2018 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"A family of consensus protocols that sample the network repeatedly and tip toward one outcome. The 2018 note was pseudonymous. A later write-up adds named co-authors. Avalanche the network is an implementation, not the sample itself.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/avalanche","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/avalanche","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/avalanche","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Avalanche study","href":"/whitepaper/avalanche"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Algorand","href":"/whitepaper/algorand"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Hedera","href":"/whitepaper/hashgraph"}]}