Athereum is a “spoon”, or friendly fork, of Ethereum. Avalanche was first revealed in May 2018, making Athereum the first network that uses the Avalanche consensus. It offers superior transaction speed and better scalability for ETH.
Aethereum And Avalanche
With its unique technology, Athereum effectively provides a new replay-protected network for ETH, thanks to the high performance of the AVA platform. Its core characteristic is that it supports efficient and modular decentralized services, as well as focusing on reducing the challenges when it comes to trading new types of cryptocurrencies. This platform will allow developers to create their own subnetworks, which can issue and use any type of digital asset. Athereum is a “friendly fork”, meaning that it isn’t a contentious fork. This is not meant as a replacement for ETH, but as an alternative environment for developers to run and build dApps at a higher throughput and faster finality.
The unique aspect of the alternative network is the use of the Avalanche consensus, which differs from the longest-chain consensus. One of the advantages that it has is that the throughput can be as high as the EVM can handle and the transactions can be confirmed within 1-2 seconds. The network is powerful enough to support thousands of fully participating nodes without any hindrances to the consensus speed.
How to Connect to The Testnet
In order to see these features in action, you will need to connect to the testnet of Athereum. You can run tests on the chain as much as you want and try out the consensus method. Usually, in order to test a network, you will need coins to pay for fees and anything else that can come up. Hence, а free Authereum faucet was created. Using it requires MyEtherWallet and a private key that is different than the one you use for managing your ETH. For security reasons, we recommend creating a new address on the testnet. If you are interested, you can check out the Athereum Network Faucet and make sure to read the Testnet Connection Guide as well.
Conclusion
The PoC consensus algorithm seems very promising from its capabilities in the testnet. It increases the transaction speed and simplicity, and it is only limited by the EVM. It is a new consensus and it is not thoroughly tested out yet through time, so skepticism is unavoidable.