Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM) Launches with the First Native Subnet-to-Subnet Message on Avalanche Mainnet

Avalanche is closing out the year strong with the final AvalancheGo release of 2022. Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM) is rolling out in AvalancheGo Banff 5, bringing fast, reliable native communications to all Avalanche Subnets. AWM Is available today in both the Golang and Rust VM SDKs for use by any VM builder. Soon, this capability will be rolled out to the subnet-evm, giving Subnet creators native, cross-chain communication capabilities out-of-the-box.

Prior to the release of Banff 5, Subnets were already a leading solution to help scale custom blockchain networks. Subnets gave anyone the power of Avalanche along with fully customizable parameters and rulesets that catered to the unique needs of every deployment. No longer do permissionless dApps have to compete with others for infrastructure resources, and no longer do large enterprise deployments have to worry about compliance, as they can be programmed in a permissioned environment.

The next major ask for Subnets was native communication. Projects that wanted to transfer assets or data between Subnets had to deploy and manage their own bridges. This all ends today with the launch of Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM) in Banff 5. Subnets will never be the same.

What technically is happening in Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM)?

AWM enables Subnet Validators to collectively produce a BLS Multi-Signature that attests to the validity of an arbitrary message (e.g., transfer, contract data, etc.) that can be verified by any other Subnet. Because all Subnet Validators must validate the Primary Network via the P-Chain, they can access the stake weights and registered BLS public keys of any other Subnet at any time. This means that Subnets communicating with each other don’t need to periodically send each other information about changes in their respective validator sets to continue verifying messages, making any-to-any messaging practical. Elastic Subnets, AWM, and arbitrary VM support via both Golang and Rust Developer SDKs make Subnets the most performant and complete solution for launching your own blockchain.

“Cross-chain messaging has become a critical tool in our development toolbox enabling Kingdom Studios to build innovative on-chain experiences for the DeFi Kingdoms player base. The Avalanche Warp Messaging gives yet another reason to build in the Avalanche ecosystem, enabling secure transmission of messages between Avalanche Subnets with developer-friendly tooling. AWM allows DeFi Kingdoms to easily interact with DeFi and gaming protocols built on other Avalanche Subnets.” — Magnus Ironroot, Lead Solidity Developer at Kingdom Studios

AWM Enables Subnets with Customizable Warp Messaging Rulesets

Avalanche provides a low-level specification for AWM, requiring just an array of bytes, an index of who participated in the BLS Multi-Signature, and the BLS Multi-Signature. It is up to Subnets to populate this set of message bytes however they want, allowing them to determine which Subnets they want to accept messages from and to specify the weight a BLS Multi-Signature must have to be considered valid (i.e., Subnet A accepts messages from Subnet B that are signed by at least 70% of stake but not messages from Subnet C).

AWM developers can create their own messaging specifications or employ existing standards from other teams to power their communication. There are no specific standards to adhere by, opening up more opportunities for the development community to take AWM and unleash more advanced communications formats. We look forward to seeing all of the awesome innovations to come!

“The scaling that Subnets introduce is incredibly powerful but their lack of horizontal composability makes the Cross-Subnet UX much harder for users to manage. The native and generic messaging provided by Avalanche Warp Messaging helps move this forward tremendously by enabling direct communication between different blockchains on Avalanche. LayerZero is super excited to build on this new primitive and collaborate on VM SDKs to make Cross-Subnet communication even easier to use.” — Bryan Pellegrino, Co-Founder & CEO at LayerZero Labs

The First Native Subnet-to-Subnet Message on Avalanche

To showcase Avalanche Warp Messaging, Ava Labs developed the XSVM with 2 basic capabilities: transferring assets on a Subnet and transferring assets between Subnets. Ava Labs deployed this VM to the “let there” and “be messaging” Subnets on Avalanche Mainnet.

After deployment, the first native Subnet-to-Subnet message was sent today on December 22 at 6:42:29AM UTC (1:42:29AM ET).

You can view the code for this demo and how straightforward it is to utilize this new framework: https://github.com/ava-labs/xsvm

AWM is supported in the Golang and Rust VM SDKs and can be used by any VM builder today. Over the coming weeks, we will expand support to the subnet-evm. Subnets have improved and grown with more features in the last few months and are rapidly becoming the best place for building the most expressive, performant, and crypto-native platforms. Subnet builders can now utilize Elastic Staking (to allow people to stake custom tokens to validate their subnet), the Rust VM SDK (building blockchains entirely in Rust), and now, Avalanche Warp Messaging (to send messages between Subnets). See you in 2023!

After deployment, the first native Subnet-to-Subnet message was sent today on December 22 at 6:42:29AM UTC (1:42:29AM ET).

You can view the code for this demo and how straightforward it is to utilize this new framework: https://github.com/ava-labs/xsvm

AWM is supported in the Golang and Rust VM SDKs and can be used by any VM builder today. Over the coming weeks, we will expand support to the subnet-evm. Subnets have improved and grown with more features in the last few months and are rapidly becoming the best place for building the most expressive, performant, and crypto-native platforms. Subnet builders can now utilize Elastic Staking (to allow people to stake custom tokens to validate their subnet), the Rust VM SDK (building blockchains entirely in Rust), and now, Avalanche Warp Messaging (to send messages between Subnets). See you in 2023!