Avalanche is a popular Decentralised Finance (DeFi) blockchain.
The top DeFi protocols that run on Avalanche are AAVE, Trader Joe, Wonderland, Benqi, and Curve.
What I like the most about Avalanche is that it lets anyone launch customized private & public blockchains.
Avalanche, with a transactional throughput of more than 4500 tps, performs phenomenally faster than Bitcoin (7 tps), Ethereum (14 tps), and Polkadot (1500 tps).
In terms of transactional finality, Avalanche (less than 2 seconds) leads as compared to Bitcoin (60 mins), Ethereum (6 min), and Polkadot (60 seconds).
AVAX is Avalanche's native token and it can be used for staking, paying fees, and providing a unit of account between the multiple subnetworks created on Avalanche.
Consensus mechanism:
Snow protocol family (leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols)