AVAX

Avalanche · Snowman PoS L1 (C-Chain EVM + Avalanche L1s)

49 /100

T3Mixed · #17 of 77

Money routeTwo-way ↗medium likelihoodReviewed Oct 23, 2026

DemandSoundnessDurability

18 of 4522 of 409 of 15

Key facts

SupplyFloat 94% of issued supply

Circulating 443.9M, 62%
Locked or unvested 26.7M, 4%
Not yet issued 249.4M, 35%
Max 720.0M

FDV / market cap

1.1x

$4.2B / $4.0B

Market cap

$4.0B

Price $9.02, 7d −9.2%

Market data: CoinGecko, Oct 24, 2026. Scores reviewed Oct 23, 2026.

Assessment

The mechanism is as clean as a chain gets: every fee is burned by protocol rule, no fee reaches the block producer, and issuance is capped and already being cut (ACP-285). The problem is scale: the burn is ~$3-5M a year against ~$100M a year of newly minted staking rewards, fees and DeFi TVL are both down about 70% year on year in dollars, and the Feb 2024 halt keeps the track record short. Distribution is the structural weak point: insiders received ~268M AVAX, 37% of the cap and over half of all AVAX issued so far, and in Oct 2025 the Foundation sold 7.3M AVAX to a treasury company at a 60% discount, terms the public never had. Security is mid-grade: permissionless staking with no dominant entity, but one client and a stake attack cost of roughly half a billion dollars at spot. US spot ETFs exist with staking but hold only tens of millions.

How value reaches holders

Burn only, at 100% of fees: every C-Chain fee (base and priority) goes to the blackhole address, 5.11M AVAX all time and 261,781 AVAX (~$2.9M) in the year to Oct 23, 2026, and P-Chain transaction and L1 validator fees (18,828 AVAX since Dec 2024) leave supply. Against that, staking mints ~11.9M AVAX/yr toward the 720M cap, so the burn offsets roughly 2-5% of issuance and the ~5-6% staking yield is dilution, not fee income. Fee cuts shrank the base (C-Chain floor 25 to 1 nAVAX on Dec 16, 2024, then 1 wei on Apr 8, 2025); Helicon's validator-voted floor (5 nAVAX at activation on Sep 22, 2026, 2.5 nAVAX since mid-Oct) lifted the burn to a ~527K AVAX/yr pace

Score anatomy

Demand

18 / 45: the stronger of two routes, plus adoption

Why would anyone hold it: does value reach the token, and is the network or product used today?

Holder routing engine input

Every C-Chain fee, base and priority, is paid to the blackhole address (block coinbase 0x0100...0000) and P-Chain fees are burned; changing that needs a validator-adopted network upgrade

Plumbing at 90%+, non-discretionary and hard to changehigh confidenceHow this is scored

Revenue reality engine input

261,781 AVAX burned on the C-Chain in the year to Oct 23, 2026 (~$2.9M on DefiLlama); the post-Helicon pace is ~527K AVAX/yr (~$4.8M), still under $5M

$0.5-5M/yr, or undisclosedhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Monetary usage engine input

Beyond gas: two listed treasury companies hold ~27.5M AVAX (~5.9% of supply) as reserves and ~$181M of AVAX and sAVAX is supplied on Aave v3, a venue Ava Labs does not control; niche, under 10%

Measurable niche monetary use: payment rails, savings products, or collateral at third-party venues below the next levelmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Adoption ×3

Avalanche stablecoins $1.41B (-27% YoY), TVL $0.56B (-69% in dollars) and fees $2.9M (-73%); niche next to leading chains and losing share

Niche: real but small use, far behind its category leadersmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Two routes, the stronger counts

Revenue 1, minus 0 for routing 5 = cash flow 1. Money use 2. The engine is the stronger route: 2.

Soundness

22 / 40

Can a long-term holder trust the rules: supply, float, distribution and control?

Supply discipline ×3

Staking mints ~2.5% of issued supply a year toward the 720M hard cap, declining as rewards shrink toward the cap (ACP-285 cuts the floor by Dec 2026); changes need a network upgrade validators adopt.

Under 1%/yr net without a hard cap, a hard cap with halvings issuing 1-3%/yr, or zero issuance where binding on-chain token governance could vote to mint moremedium confidenceHow this is scored

Float and unlocks ×1

94% of created supply is liquid; 27.9M AVAX stays timelocked, released ~1.67M per quarter to the Foundation into 2030 (~0.13% of float a month); its unlocked treasury is undisclosed

Small tails only, or 85%+ of supply liquidmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Distribution ×2

Insiders got ~268M AVAX, ~57% of the 474M ever issued (team, Foundation, endowment, partners; seed and private 43M at ~$0.33-0.50 vs public $0.50 vested); the Foundation still directs 27.9M locked AVAX

Insiders received over 50%, or one organization directs over 30% todaymedium confidenceHow this is scored

Decentralization and security ×2

Halting needs roughly 20-25% of the 216.5M AVAX staked (~$0.4-0.5B at spot) and the largest reward-owner group holds ~5.5%, but one client (AvalancheGo) runs the network

Attack cost $100M-1B with the top entity under 35%, or contracts immutable or upgradeable only by on-chain vote with a 7+ day exit window on a base layer scoring 4+medium confidenceHow this is scored

Durability

9 / 15

Is it big, proven and reachable by institutions?

Scale ×1

$4.1B market cap (band 4), $359.9M/day median volume (band 4), no flags.

Major: $1-10B market cap and $50M/day+How this is scored

Track record ×1

Six years since the Sep 2020 mainnet through a 94% drawdown, but block finalization stalled ~5 hours on Feb 23, 2024 until validators upgraded, inside the 5-year window

3-5 years, or a rollback, coordinated chain-wide halt or restart, or a $50M+ exploit in the last 5 yearshigh confidenceHow this is scored

Institutional access ×1

Three US spot ETFs with staking (VanEck VAVX from Jan 2026, Grayscale GAVA, Bitwise BAVA) hold roughly $35-40M combined, far below $500M

One US spot ETF, or US ETFs under $500Mmedium confidenceHow this is scored

What would move it up

To reach T2 Strong, 4 gates are still open:

Score 49needs 55(open)
Value engine 2needs 3(open)
Adoption 2needs 3(open)
Distribution 0needs 1(open)
Supply 4gate 2(met)
Security 3gate 2(met)
Float and unlocks 4gate 1(met)
Scale 4gate 3(met)

Tier outlook · next trigger Dec 21, 2026

Two-way ↗medium likelihood

Post-Helicon burn pace vs the $5M/yr revenue line (~547K AVAX/yr at $9.14); validators set the gas floor (2.5 nAVAX now)
ACP-285 ramp ends ~Dec 21, 2026 (reward floor 7.5%) and any move toward the Foundation's zero-inflation, fee-to-validator model
Foundation treasury disclosures and further discounted sales like the 7.3M AVAX sold to AVAT in Oct 2025
US spot ETF assets (~$35-40M) and treasury companies (AVAX One 14.09M, AVAT ~13.4M with part pledged as loan collateral)
A halt or a second client; the Feb 23, 2024 stall leaves the 5-year window on Feb 23, 2029

Research report

Oct 23, 2026 · source confidence 80%

Avalanche runs a staking network whose main chain, the C-Chain, is EVM compatible, alongside independent Avalanche L1s that pay a small continuous fee in AVAX to the platform chain. The fee design is among the cleanest of any layer 1: every C-Chain fee, including the priority tip, is burned, and platform-chain fees are destroyed as well. The weakness is scale. About 262,000 AVAX, roughly $2.9 million, was burned in the year to October 23, 2026, after fee floors were cut in December 2024 and April 2025; the Helicon upgrade of September 22, 2026 let validators vote a higher minimum gas price, lifting the burn to an annual pace near 527,000 AVAX. Staking, meanwhile, mints about 12 million AVAX a year toward the 720 million cap, around 2.5% of supply, easing toward 2.2% as a reward cut phases in by December. Supply concentration is the other open question: insiders received about 268 million AVAX, more than half of all AVAX issued so far, the Foundation still receives a quarterly release into 2030, and in October 2025 it sold 7.3 million AVAX to a treasury company at a 60% discount. Three US spot ETFs with staking launched in 2026 but hold only tens of millions of dollars, and network activity measured in dollars fell by roughly two thirds over the year.

Structure (22 facts)

Chain: Avalanche Primary Network (P-Chain staking and L1 registry, X-Chain, C-Chain EVM) under Snowman consensus; mainnet 2020-09-21. One production client, AvalancheGo v1.15.x (Ava Labs). Upgrades: Etna 2024-12-16 (ACP-77 L1s, ACP-125), Octane/Fortuna 2025-04-08 (ACP-176), Granite 2025-11-19, Helicon 2026-09-22 (ACP-194 async execution, 236, 267, 273, 283, 285)
What it is: smart-contract L1 and L1-creation platform; AVAX is gas on the C-Chain, the only stake asset for the Primary Network, and the currency of L1 validator fees
Supply now: official supply API 2026-10-23: total 468,813,040 AVAX = 360M genesis + 113,992,194 minted as staking rewards to date minus burns (C-Chain 5,113,923, X-Chain 45,622, P-Chain 19,609 incl. L1 validator fees 18,828); 27,904,730 still timelocked; P-Chain getCurrentSupply 475,697,972 (before C/X burns); CoinGecko circulating 443.9M, total 470.6M
Max supply: 720,000,000
Market cap (approx): $4,059,000,000
Emission: staking rewards minted at the start of each staking period: reward = (720M - supply) x stake/supply x period/year x consumption rate, rate between MinConsumptionRate and MaxConsumptionRate 0.12 by duration. Current positions annualize to ~9.71M AVAX for 176.9M of validator stake, ~11.9M AVAX/yr including 39.6M delegated (~2.5% of issued supply). ACP-285 (Helicon) lowers MinConsumptionRate 0.10 to 0.075 linearly over 90 days from 2026-09-22, taking the run-rate to ~10.2M AVAX/yr (~2.2%) at today's stake. No halvings; issuance shrinks only as supply nears the cap
Mint authority: none outside the reward formula: no foundation or treasury mint; the cap and rates are protocol parameters changed only by an ACP shipped in AvalancheGo and adopted by validators (no on-chain token vote). The last change (ACP-285) cut issuance
Fee burn: C-Chain blocks set coinbase to 0x0100000000000000000000000000000000000000, so base and priority fees are both burned (docs: unlike Ethereum, the priority fee is burned). Blackhole balance 5,114,148 AVAX on 2026-10-23; burned 648,270 AVAX since 2024-10-23, 261,781 since 2025-10-23, 78,433 since 2026-07-23. Post-Helicon (33.9 days) 49,040 AVAX, ~527K AVAX/yr pace, vs 18,385 AVAX in the 30 days before. P-Chain: L1 validators pay a continuous fee (512 nAVAX/s, ~16 AVAX/yr each; 578 active L1 validators across 77 L1s listed), 18,828 AVAX since Etna
Fee history: C-Chain minimum base fee 25 nAVAX until 2024-12-16 (ACP-125 cut it to 1 nAVAX), ACP-176 set a 1-wei floor on 2025-04-08 and observed base fees sat near 0.05-0.1 nAVAX through Sep 2026 while XEN-style spam filled blocks (~2-3M tx/day sampled Oct 2025 to Jul 2026). ACP-283 (Helicon) made the floor a stake-weighted validator vote: 5 nAVAX from activation, 2.5 nAVAX since ~2026-10-16; sampled activity fell to ~0.35M tx/day
Revenue: DefiLlama Avalanche chain fees (blackhole balance diff, C-Chain only): $2.87M in the trailing year vs ~$9.8M the year before (-71%); last 30 days $460K, last 7 days $60.5K. All of it is burned, so revenue equals holder routing
Distribution: 720M cap: staking rewards 50% (360M, minted over time), team 10% (72M, 4-year vesting), Foundation 9.26% (66.67M, 10-year quarterly), Community and Development Endowment 7% (50.4M), strategic partners 5% (36M), public sale 10% (72M), private sale 3.46% (24.91M), seed 2.5% (18M), airdrop 2.5%, testnet incentives ~0.3%. Insider total ~268M = 37.2% of the cap and 56.5% of the ~474M AVAX ever issued (360M genesis + 114M staking rewards)
Sale: seed 2019 (~$6M, a16z, Polychain; ~$0.33 per aggregator data), private sale Jun 2020 ($12M, Galaxy, Bitmain, Initialized, NGC, Dragonfly; ~$0.50 per aggregator data), public sale Jul 15, 2020 (72M AVAX, ~$42M, sold out in under 4.5 hours, accredited and non-US buyers only under Reg D 506(c) and Reg S): options A1 and A2 at $0.50 with 1-year or 18-month quarterly vesting, option B at $0.85 unlocked
Foundation: Avalanche Foundation (BVI and Cayman entities) receives ~1.67M AVAX per quarter from the timelocked schedule (next 2026-11-08, ending ~2030); its unlocked balance is not published. Oct 2025: sold 7.3M AVAX to Avalanche Treasury Co's operating company for $50M cash plus $30M of shares, a 60% discount on $200M pre-discount value, tokens restricted 5 years (AVAT 10-Q, Q1 2026). Nov 2024: bought back 1.97M AVAX from the Terraform estate for $45.5M
Unlocks: 27.9M AVAX timelocked (5.95% of issued supply), ~0.56M/month on average (~0.13% of circulating per month) to the Foundation into 2030; team, partner, sale and airdrop schedules are complete
Security: 2026-10-23: 611 Primary Network validators (min 2,000 AVAX, max weight 3M), 38,755 delegators, 216.48M AVAX staked (46% of supply). Largest node 1.4% of stake incl. delegations; grouped by reward owner the largest group is 5.5% (4 nodes), 15 groups pass one third, 30 pass half. Snowman samples k=20 with alpha 15, so roughly 20-25% of stake can stall finality: ~43-54M AVAX, ~$0.4-0.5B at spot. Single client (AvalancheGo); validator versions 1.15.0-1.15.2
Track record: mainnet 2020-09-21; Primary Network finalization stalls in Mar 2023 (two, AvalancheGo v1.9.12/1.9.14) and on 2024-02-23 (~5 hours, gossip bug triggered by inscriptions, resolved as validators upgraded to v1.11.1); P-Chain mempool delays 2024-12-17 (not a halt); no halt found since. Drawdown -93.7% from the 2021 high
Institutional access: US spot ETFs: VanEck VAVX (Nasdaq, launched 2026-01-26, 0.20%, ~$13.2M on 2026-08-28), Bitwise BAVA (NYSE Arca, from 2026-04-14, net assets $16.7M on 2026-06-30 per 10-Q, staking), Grayscale GAVA (Avalanche Trust uplisted, ~650K AVAX, ~81% staked per Aug 2026 report). Combined roughly $35-40M
Treasury companies: AVAX One (Nasdaq AVX, formerly AgriFORCE): 14,091,424 AVAX and equivalents on 2026-08-13. Avalanche Treasury Corp (Nasdaq AVAT, Dragonfly-sponsored SPAC): 13.39M AVAX at 2026-03-31 at a $265.3M cost basis, 5.6M AVAX pledged for a $25M loan (May 2026), going-concern language in its Q1 10-Q, stock down over 90% from its June 2026 debut
Usage: DefiLlama 2026-10-23: Avalanche DeFi TVL $566M (from $1.83B a year earlier, -69%), stablecoins $1.41B (from $1.94B, -27%); single-asset AVAX and sAVAX pools ~$506M incl. Benqi liquid staking $218M and Aave/Benqi lending ~$280M; C-Chain ~0.35M tx/day after Helicon
Liquidity: ~$189M/day (CoinGecko, 4.6% of market cap); Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX spot
Ethereum: no canonical AVAX ERC-20; the Avalanche Bridge moves Ethereum assets to Avalanche, not AVAX to Ethereum
Provenance gaps: Avalanche Foundation unlocked holdings and spending are unpublished; seed and private sale prices come from aggregators, and the public option prices do not reconcile exactly with the reported $42M raise; entity-level validator concentration is inferred from reward-owner addresses

Market figures at report date (Oct 23, 2026)

Price (approx): $9.14
All-time high / low: 144.96 (2021-11-21), now -93.7%; 19.02 on 2025-10-23, -52% over 1y

Sources (25)

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How the ranking works and how AVAX compares: see the full ranking. This entry as JSON:

GET https://tokens.10102.io/api/v1/tokenomics?symbol=AVAX