The Avalanche Foundation presented a new research agenda at the Summit 2026 in New York City on September 16. The proposal focuses on a framework for managing the AVAX token economy as staking rewards from the genesis allocation approach exhaustion.
The proposed model consists of three stages: measuring ecosystem output, capturing value at the protocol level, and distributing it to validators and stakers. This approach aims to address the long-term sustainability of network security as the current reward pool depletes.
AVAX has a maximum supply of 720 million tokens, with transaction fees currently being burned. The Foundation is exploring mechanisms to ensure that economic value generated by subnets and applications flows back to the protocol layer to incentivize validators.
The initiative coincides with the upcoming Helicon mainnet upgrade, scheduled for September 22, 2026. The Foundation intends to use these research findings as a basis for future governance decisions regarding the economic model of the network.
