Ava Labs, the team behind Avalanche, a high-throughput platform for deploying decentralized applications (dApps) and custom chains, has introduced Firewood, an update that represents a multi-year effort aimed at enhancing blockchain data storage efficiency. Firewood addresses a critical challenge in the expansion of blockchain networks: data management.
Ava Labs has now open-sourced the Firewood code for community refinement before its final implementation. The ultimate goal is to establish Firewood as a valuable tool for improving the organization and efficiency of blockchain data. To achieve this objective, Ava Labs developers are taking a fresh approach to data storage and management, departing from the methods used in legacy networks.
Traditional blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin rely on the Merkle Tree structure for data organization. However, this architecture tends to become slow and inefficient as the blockchain grows.
Ava Labs is tackling the limitations of the Merkle Tree system by building Firewood from the ground up, incorporating enhancements to the system. Their primary aim is to streamline blockchain data storage and organization.
Notably, Firewood does not depend on generic tools like LevelDB or RocksDB, which Ava Labs believes have caused alignment issues and significant overhead in terms of disk I/O, size, and serialization/deserialization of Tree data structures. Firewood aims to replace the combination of LevelDB/RocksDB and Merkle Tree, offering users a more efficient data storage system. This improvement will enable high-throughput storage without the need for constant data cleanup or compression.
Shortly, Ava Labs plans to integrate Firewood into various aspects of the Avalanche platform. Additionally, the team intends to release a series of reproducible benchmarks comparing Firewood’s performance to other blockchain databases.
The release of Firewood comes at a challenging time for AVAX, the native token of Avalanche, which has faced significant pressure in 2023. This pressure is attributed to the bear market and recent statements from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) characterizing AVAX as an unregistered security.
Avalanche price on October 2| Source: AVAXUSDT on Binance, TradingView
As of now, AVAX is trading at $9.53, marking an 11% increase from its September 2023 lows but still down approximately 60% from its 2023 high of around $20.