Avalanche is a network composed of multiple blockchains. Each blockchain is an instance of a Virtual Machine (VM), much like an object in an object-oriented language is an instance of a class. That is, the VM defines the behavior of the blockchain. Coreth (from core Ethereum) is the Virtual Machine (VM) that defines the Contract Chain (C-Chain). This chain implements the Ethereum Virtual Machine and supports Solidity smart contracts as well as most other Ethereum client functionality.
The C-Chain runs in a separate process from the main AvalancheGo process and communicates with it over a local gRPC connection.
AvalancheGo's build script downloads Coreth, compiles it, and places the binary into the avalanchego/build/plugins directory.
The C-Chain supports the following API namespaces:
ethpersonaltxpooldebug
Only the eth namespace is enabled by default.
To enable the other namespaces see the instructions for passing in the coreth-config parameter to AvalancheGo: https://docs.avax.network/build/references/command-line-interface#plugins.
Full documentation for the C-Chain's API can be found here.
The C-Chain is compatible with almost all Ethereum tooling, including Remix, Metamask and Truffle.
As a network composed of multiple blockchains, Avalanche uses atomic transactions to move assets between chains. Coreth modifies the Ethereum block format by adding an ExtraData field, which contains the atomic transactions.
The C-Chain supports Avalanche Native Tokens, which are created on the X-Chain using precompiled contracts. These precompiled contracts nativeAssetCall and nativeAssetBalance support the same interface for ANTs as CALL and BALANCE do for AVAX with the added parameter of assetID to specify the asset.
For the full documentation of precompiles for interacting with ANTs and using them in ARC-20s, see here.
Blocks are produced asynchronously in Snowman Consensus, so the timing assumptions that apply to Ethereum do not apply to Coreth. To support block production in an async environment, a block is permitted to have the same timestamp as its parent. Since there is no general assumption that a block will be produced every 10 seconds, smart contracts built on Avalanche should use the block timestamp instead of the block number for their timing assumptions.
A block with a timestamp more than 10 seconds in the future will not be considered valid. However, a block with a timestamp more than 10 seconds in the past will still be considered valid as long as its timestamp is greater than or equal to the timestamp of its parent block.