Team Rocket

OG AVAX lore starts with Team Rocket, not a mascot cat. In May 2018 a pseudonymous group calling itself Team Rocket dropped the “Snowflake to Avalanche” paper on IPFS. Cornell researchers led by Emin Gün Sirer, with PhD students Maofan “Ted” Yin and Kevin Sekniqi, later built on it and founded Ava Labs. Mainnet launched September 2020. The genesis block message is still quoted: “From Snowflake to Avalanche. Per consensum ad astra.”