Avalanche integrates with Torus to bring one-click Google logins

Previously known as Ava Labs, Avalanche is a blockchain protocol designed to provide an open-source platform for launching decentralized finance applications and enterprise blockchain solutions. Emin Gün Sirer, a professor at Cornell, founded the project in 2019 with others at Cornell and later brought on talent from Wall Street.

The company most recently announced that the Avalanche protocol has integrated DirectAuth by Torus to provide users with one-click logins. In a blog post, the company said, “We’re excited to lay down the necessary infrastructure for user-focused decentralized finance applications with Avalanche and look forward to the new wave of pragmatic applications to be built with Avalanche and DirectAuth.”

Torus is a Singapore based company founded in 2018, which allows users to start making use of blockchain applications using familiar authentication methods like Google or Facebook login. The company’s goal is to allow any digital identity to be a valid cross-platform identifier, allowing users to bring their digital identities with them to any application on the Internet.

Torus raised US$2M in 2019 from investors including Binance, Coinbase, Multicoin Capital and Accomplice. Other blockchain projects and companies that have integrated Torus include Augur, KyberSwap, Totle, Loopring, Curve and a range of others.

With Torus’ DirectAuth users or applications can create new Ethereum blockchain wallets in a single step with social identities that include Google, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, Discord, AppleID, Github, LinkedIn, Twitter, Line and Passwordless Accounts.

Torus’s Wallet and DirectAuth are blockchain agnostic and compatible on both web and native applications. According to the company, developers can integrate its solutions regardless of their specific infrastructure of choice. Torus is already in use by teams building on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Solana, Ontology, Zilliqa, Cosmos, Arweave and Near.

After raising a significant amount of funding from renowned VCs, Avalanche is another project on a list of projects trying to rival Ethereum. Some of these other projects include NEAR Protocol, Polkadot and Cardano.

Avalanche recently concluded the Avalanche Token (AVAX) public sale. On July 15th the token sale raised US$42M in 4.5 hours through the sale of its native token, AVAX. The total number of tokens sold in the public sale was 72M tokens which is 20% of the mainnet supply.

AVAX is a utility token for securing the network through staking, platform fees, and providing a basic unit of account between subnets–a set of nodes that validate blockchains on Avalanche.

Emin Gün Sirer stated that the token sale is “significant validation for the technology, team, and vision behind Avalanche, and just the latest of many milestones to come for the project. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to its success thus far, and we look forward to welcoming the next waves of people into the Avalanche community."

In the last week of June 2020, the company announced that they have raised US$12M in a private token sale led by Initialized, Galaxy Digital, Bitmain, NGC and Dragonfly Capital. The sale’s closing followed the success of Avalanche’s Denali Testnet, which had over 1,000 full block producing nodes actively staking and participating in the consensus protocol.

Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital stated, “Avalanche is solving the biggest challenges in blockchain technology, and is poised to launch a resilient system that is fast, secure, and efficient.”

Ava Labs first round of funding occurred in February 2019, where the company raised US$6M from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Metastable, Initialized and Ramtin Naimi of Abstract Ventures.

Currently, the Avalanche team is made of up 39 individuals who are experts in computer science, economics, finance, and law. The company has offices in New York City and Ithaca, New York.