AVAX · the staking mint now outruns a shrunken fee burn.
AVAX is the gas and staking token of Avalanche, a proof-of-stake network with a 720M hard cap — ~431.8M circulating, with new coins minted as staking rewards and every transaction fee burned.
Sell pressure. Staking rewards mint about 3.4M AVAX over 90 days toward the cap, plus a quarterly 1.67M Foundation vesting cliff on Aug 10 2026.
Buy pressure. Every fee is burned — but after the base fee was cut to a floor, that is only about 0.11M AVAX over 90 days, a fraction of the mint.
Net. About +1.15% to market — with burn now far below the mint, supply is growing, not flat.
- Foundation quarterly vesting cliff~1.67MAug 10 2026 · added to market
Avalanche mints new AVAX as staking rewards to validators and delegators — all validator income is newly minted, because transaction fees are burned rather than paid out. With about 201.9M AVAX staked (a 46.76% staking ratio) earning roughly 6.8% a year, the protocol mints on the order of 3.4M AVAX over 90 days toward the 720M hard cap. This is the largest single supply force.
The Foundation allocation — 9.26% of supply, about 66.67M AVAX — vests on a quarterly schedule of 1.67M AVAX per cliff. The next cliff lands Aug 10 2026, inside this window (the prior cliff was May 12 2026). These tokens unlock into Foundation custody, so they are new unlocked supply but do not immediately reach the trading float.
No discretionary Foundation market sale was observed in the window — the quarterly cliff is already counted above and lands in custody. Tracked team-controlled overhangs: the Foundation treasury (about 66.67M allocation, with roughly 28.34M still on the quarterly vesting schedule) and the ~31.67M of AVAX that is minted but not yet circulating.
No bankruptcy estate or court-ordered distribution applies to AVAX.
Avalanche runs no buyback program. Validator income comes from newly minted staking rewards plus burned fees, not from a treasury buying AVAX on the market.
Every C-Chain base fee, and the priority fee too, is permanently burned under Avalanche's EIP-1559-style dynamic fee. After the ACP-125 upgrade cut the minimum base fee from 25 to 1 nAVAX, burn is low — recent activity burns about 1,000 to 1,300 AVAX a day, roughly 0.11M over 90 days, far below the ~3.4M staking mint. Cumulative lifetime burn is about 5.4M AVAX.
There is no Foundation open-market buying of AVAX.
AVAX staking locks and auto-relock are structural to the consensus mechanism, not a new lockup event created in this window.
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