Welcome back, Dr. Sirer on our 50th episode! The Avalanche consensus protocol was released last year by a pseudonymous team of researches "Team Rocket" (no relation to Pokemon, our sources say). Dr. Emin Gün Sirer has been a strong proponent of the protocol and has developed an implementation under his company AVA Labs. With test TPS of 6500 on a realistic test environment, AVA is already showing speeds rivaling VISA on Black Friday. We re-hash Avalanche for the audience and then explain how the AVA implementation works, learning more about open questions such as smart contracts on AVA.