Avalanche

AVAX is the native coin of Avalanche, a smart-contract blockchain, used to pay fees and secure the network through staking.

Avalanche is a public blockchain for smart contracts and custom networks. Its mainnet launched on 21 September 2020. It was built by Ava Labs, a company founded by Cornell professor Emin Gün Sirer, which raised about $45 million in AVAX sales in July 2020. AVAX is the network's native coin: it pays transaction fees, is staked by validators (the computers that confirm transactions) and gives them weight in network decisions.

AVAX has a hard cap of 720 million. Half was created at genesis, and the rest can only be created as staking rewards. All transaction fees are burned, meaning permanently destroyed. On 27 September 2026 the network reported a supply of at most about 474.8 million AVAX, of which about 204 million, roughly 43%, was staked. Ava Labs put annual inflation at about 5.5% before the September 2026 upgrade and expects it to fall.

The main network has three chains: the C-Chain for Ethereum-compatible apps, the P-Chain for staking and coordination, and the X-Chain for transfers. Companies and governments can also run their own Avalanche L1 networks. In September 2026 the UAE moved its UAEPASS document vault, used by about 12.5 million people, onto one. On-chain finance is smaller than on the largest networks: about $639 million of DeFi deposits and $1.4 billion of stablecoins.

The Helicon upgrade went live on 22 September 2026. It lets validators stake for as little as 48 hours instead of two weeks and renew automatically, and they must now stay online more than 90% of the time to earn rewards. In the US, AVAX is also held through spot funds, the first of which, VanEck's VAVX, began trading on 26 January 2026.