- X-Chain: creating and transferring assets
- C-Chain: Ethereum-compatible smart contracts
- P-Chain: coordinating validators and Avalanche L1s, which are custom blockchains that projects launch on Avalanche
$AVAX, the native token, pays fees and is staked by validators. Its supply is capped at 720 million tokens.
What Does Ava Labs Do?
Ava Labs is the engineering company behind Avalanche. Emin Gün Sirer, its founder and CEO, started it with two PhD candidates to build the blockchain for the financial industry. It is based in New York City and backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital.
Building The Core Software
Ava Labs develops the core software that runs Avalanche. Its developer relations team also documents network upgrades. The latest, Helicon, activated on September 22, 2026. Key changes include:
- Continuous execution (ACP-194): The C-Chain runs consensus and execution in parallel instead of taking turns, which raises throughput.
- Auto-renewed staking (ACP-236): Validators stake once, and rewards compound automatically.
- Shorter minimum stake (ACP-273): The minimum staking period dropped from two weeks to 48 hours.
- Higher uptime bar (ACP-267): Validators need 90% uptime to earn rewards, up from 80%.
ACP stands for Avalanche Community Proposal, the process used to propose changes to the protocol.
Working With Institutions
Ava Labs' solutions engineers help institutions and businesses onboard to Avalanche. Organizations building on the network include JPMorgan Chase, Apollo, FIFA, and the State of Wyoming, according to Ava Labs. On September 18, Ava Labs said the New York Stock Exchange had spent about a year testing Avalanche technology as it weighs tokenizing shares and exchange-traded funds.
Leadership Changes
On August 18, 2026, Ava Labs named former chief operating officer Charley Cooper as president, in charge of day-to-day operations. John Wu, the previous president, became a senior advisor, and Lydia Chiu was promoted to chief financial officer.
What Does The Avalanche Foundation Do?
The Avalanche Foundation describes its job as supporting "the long-term growth, decentralization, and resilience of the Avalanche network." It funds builders and studies the network's economics.
Grants For Builders
The Foundation runs Retro9000, a retroactive grant program with up to $40 million available. Retroactive means teams are paid after they show results on mainnet, not before. In June 2025, it awarded more than $1 million to 19 projects based on traction and technical delivery. In a later round, it named six more grantees sharing $160,000. Community members who refer funded projects can earn between $500 and $10,000 in $AVAX.
Research On $AVAX Tokenomics
The Foundation also leads research on how the network creates and shares value. At Avalanche Summit 2026 in New York on September 16, its chief investment officer presented a three-step framework, "measure, capture, distribute":
- Measure economic activity across Avalanche L1s and apps.
- Capture value from that activity so it flows back to the protocol.
- Distribute it to validators and stakers.
The work matters because staking rewards come from a remaining genesis allocation, not newly created tokens, and will shrink over time. The Foundation has also introduced a metric called Gross Chain Product to track output across the network.
Token Sales
The Foundation has also raised money by selling $AVAX. In September 2021, it sold $230 million in $AVAX to a group of investors that included Polychain Capital and Three Arrows Capital.
How Do The Two Work Together?
The split is easiest to see in a single upgrade. Ava Labs engineers write and document a change like Helicon. It is proposed through ACPs, and validators adopt it by running the new software. The Foundation funds teams that build on the upgraded network and studies how upgrades affect $AVAX's economics.
Institutional deals tend to involve Ava Labs. On October 14, 2026, the courts of Dubai's financial center, the DIFC Courts, began recording a cryptographic fingerprint of each court order on the Avalanche C-Chain. Sensitive case details stay offchain. Ava Labs Chief Business Officer John Nahas called it "purpose-built infrastructure" that institutions can adopt without changing how people use their services.
$AVAX traded at $9.76 on October 19, down 11.4% over seven days, per CoinGecko. It has a market cap of $4.33 billion, ranking 27th, with 443.6 million tokens in circulation. It sits 93.3% below its all-time high of $144.96.
Conclusion
Ava Labs and the Avalanche Foundation split Avalanche's work into two parts. Ava Labs builds and maintains the core software, including the Helicon upgrade, and handles institutional onboarding such as the DIFC Courts deployment. The Foundation runs grant programs such as Retro9000, leads research on $AVAX tokenomics, and supports ecosystem growth. Network changes pass through Avalanche Community Proposals before validators adopt them.
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