Snowman is a blockchain-optimized consensus protocol–high-throughput, totally ordered, and great for smart contracts. The Snowman is a totally ordered implementation of the Avalanche consensus protocol. Both the Platform Chain (P-Chain), Contract Chain (C-Chain) implement the Snowman consensus protocol. With the Cortina upgrade, the Exchange Chain (X-Chain) will also use the Snowman consensus.

When you instantiate Avalanche consensus with a VM whose state is a single UTXO and a tx format that only produces a single UTXO you get the Snowman consensus. The "UTXO" is just the "Current State" and the output UTXO is the "New State".

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