Avalanche Foundation Sets Out Its Economic Research Agenda With Clear Streams and Priorities

TL;DR

• The Avalanche Foundation’s agenda aims to measure ecosystem output, capture protocol-level value, and distribute it in ways that strengthen AVAX economics and security.
• Research will examine protocol revenue, validator incentives, staking sustainability, burns, revenue sharing, and capital allocation as issuance declines over time across the network.
• Findings will appear through the public Economics of Blockchain series, with the agenda remaining open to revision as evidence develops and Avalanche evolves further.

The Avalanche Foundation has published an economic research agenda designed to explain how activity across the network can translate into value for AVAX. The framework starts from a deceptively simple sequence: measure what the ecosystem creates, capture a portion at the protocol level, and distribute it to reinforce the token and network. The central problem is that economic activity does not automatically strengthen the asset securing the blockchain. Applications, users, and builders may generate substantial output, yet without deliberate capture mechanisms, that value can pass through Avalanche without improving validator incentives, security, or long-term sustainability.

The agenda places Gross Chain Product at the center of measurement, treating ecosystem production as the source of protocol surplus and income. Gross Chain Income adds a lens by tracking income that may originate outside the onchain economy but reaches participants and balances within it. Avalanche wants vague claims about ecosystem value replaced by near real-time, auditable economic indicators. Together, the measures are intended to reveal how much value currently accrues to AVAX and how much could be captured, while creating a clearer basis for evaluating fees, revenue mechanisms, and the network’s broader economic performance.

Three research streams connect measurement with AVAX value accrual

The first stream studies tokenomics and protocol revenue capture, including transaction fees, MEV, application revenue, L1 revenue sharing, and other native mechanisms. The second examines validator economics as Avalanche’s finite issuance budget declines and fee revenue becomes increasingly important for sustaining long-term staking incentives. The agenda treats network security as a recurring economic cost rather than a feature delivered once. The third stream focuses on distributing captured value through options such as burns, validator-directed revenue, and other allocation mechanisms intended to maximize AVAX value accrual without undermining the activity producing that value in practical terms.

The Foundation will publish findings through its Economics of Blockchain series, with each piece tied to the agenda’s central hypothesis, research questions, or emerging evidence. The document is presented as a starting point rather than a fixed doctrine and may be revised as the work develops. The unusual commitment is to conduct blockchain economic research systematically, empirically, and in public. That openness gives the community visibility into how the Foundation evaluates tradeoffs, from expanding protocol revenue to funding security and allocating capital, while keeping conclusions open to challenge, comparison, and revision as Avalanche’s economy evolves.