Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM)

Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM), Banff 5 AvalancheGo is live–featuring AWM, which allows developers to use high-performance, interoperable blockchain networks.

AWM is now accessible for use by any VM builder in both the Golang and Rust VM SDKs. Soon, this capability will be rolled out to the subnet-evm, giving Subnet creators native, cross-chain communication capabilities out-of-the-box.

Subnets scaled specialized blockchain networks before Banff 5. Subnets allowed everyone Avalanche authority with completely adjustable settings and rulesets for every deployment.

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. Since Subnets don’t need to routinely communicate about validator set changes to validate messages, any-to-any communications are possible. 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.

“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 on December 22 at 6:42:29AM UTC (1:42:29AM ET).