Avalanche Upgrades to ‘Banff 5’, Launches Cross-Subnet Communication System

Avalanche has upgraded its software to “Banff 5” to support Avalanche Warp Messaging, enabling seamless communication and data sharing between subnets.

Avalanche Upgrades to ‘Banff 5’, Launches Cross-Subnet Communication System

In a recent announcement, Avalanche's development team revealed the upgrade of AvalancheGo, their blockchain implementation software written in Go, to “Banff 5”.

This upgrade is pivotal for the network, introducing the Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM) protocol, which facilitates communication between subnets within the Avalanche ecosystem. With this, subnets can now share data and assets with each other more efficiently.

Prior to this upgrade, Avalanche allowed developers to build custom blockchains or subnets for various use cases using Go and Rust. However, these subnets were largely isolated and unable to communicate with each other without complex bridging systems. Banff 5 and Avalanche Warp Messaging aim to enable "seamless communication" between subnets, allowing for the transfer of assets and data.

Patrick O’Grady, technical representative at Ava Labs, commented, “Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM) is the catalyst for the explosion of subnets.”

Subnets are custom blockchains dedicated to specific applications within the Avalanche ecosystem. While they connect to the Avalanche blockchain, they do not share resources, allowing developers full control over their user experience.

See Also: Avalanche and the ‘Subnet Dream’

Two months ago, Avalanche successfully implemented flexible staking for subnet tokens through the Banff upgrade. Essentially, the Banff upgrade is a hard fork requiring validators to upgrade to the latest version, or risk being marked offline and facing reduced rewards.