Every project on this site carries one of three verdicts about whether it is worth holding for the next ten years.
Hold. A project likely to still be here in a decade, with a token that does real work and no finding that its holders are being extracted from, misled, or replaced by insiders.
Watch. A project that could go either way over the same horizon. The business may be real, but how the project is owned, run, or growing sits in a gray area that keeps the case from settling.
Avoid. A project where specific reasons not to hold have been found. Either the token has no clear reason to exist, or the way it works or is governed carries a defect that survives every argument in its favour.
None of these verdicts is a price call: a Hold does not mean buy now, and an Avoid does not mean sell now. Each is a judgment about the token itself, not the company or the technology behind it. A company can sign a client every week, and none of that revenue has to reach its token; a technology can be sound while the token routed through it has no clear job.
The token is what a person is buying, and the token is what these pages judge.
Ask Karinva
Highlight any sentence on this page and ask what it means, or choose a section and ask about that.
What Avalanche is
Avalanche is a blockchain, a shared record of who owns what, kept by many independent computers instead of by one company. It was described in a 2020 paper by Kevin Sekniqi, Daniel Laine, Stephen Buttolph and Emin Gün Sirer, and its software is built in the open.
Unlike a chain that only moves one coin, Avalanche is a platform. Apps for trading, lending and games run on its main chain, called the C-Chain. Other teams can also launch their own separate chains, which Avalanche now calls L1s, that plug into the network and talk to each other.
Think of it as a business park. Avalanche runs the roads, the gate and the power, and tenants build their own shops inside or set up their own buildings next door.
Source: Avalanche whitepaper, avax.network, ava-labs on GitHub
Why AVAX exists
AVAX is the coin that makes the network run. In the paper's words, it is "used for security and as a unit of account for exchange."
It has three jobs. The computers that keep the record, called validators, must lock up AVAX as a deposit before they can take part. Users pay fees with it. And anyone who wants to create or join one of the network's separate chains must pay a fee in AVAX.
AVAX is not a share in anything. No company pays holders out of its earnings, and holders get no cut of fees. The paper also gives holders a vote over key settings, including the fees and the reward rate.
So the question for a holder is whether enough people will need AVAX to use the network, and to secure it, to support the price.
Source: Avalanche whitepaper, avax.network
What Avalanche earns from fees
Every transaction on the C-Chain carries a fee paid in AVAX. Over the most recent 90 days, those fees ran at a pace of $1,634,458 a year. On a typical day in the past six months, they came to about $2,900.
It was much larger. In 2023, users paid $63.5 million in fees, and $47.4 million of that came in just ten days in December, peaking at $9.7 million on 20 December. The yearly total fell to $17.9 million in 2024 and $8.4 million in 2025, and 2026 has brought $1.4 million so far.
Put another way, one burst of activity in late 2023 produced about half of every fee on record. Since then, the network has earned a small fraction of that pace.
The public record starts in November 2022, so fees from Avalanche's first two years, including the 2021 boom, are not in it. It also covers the C-Chain only, not the network's other chains.
Source: DefiLlama
Where a fee goes
Every fee measured on the C-Chain is burned. The AVAX is sent to an address nobody can spend from, and it is gone for good.
That means fees are not paid to validators, to a company or to holders. They simply remove a little AVAX from existence each day. The burn is too small to offset the new coins entering supply (see below), but it means no one is quietly taking a cut of what users pay.
For you, fees do not flow to you, and they do not flow to anyone else either.
Source: DefiLlama, DefiLlama fee method
Who pays for the network
If fees are burned, validators are paid another way: in new AVAX. The paper says they are paid according to how much they lock up and for how long.
Over the past year, about 10.5 million new AVAX went out as staking rewards, worth about $94 million at the June 2026 price of $8.92. Fees ran at about $1.6 million a year. New coins pay validators close to 60 times what users pay in fees, so almost the entire cost of securing the network is paid by printing.
Counting the scheduled releases of coins set aside at launch as well, about 17 million AVAX entered supply in the past year. That adds about 4% a year to the coins released so far.
For you, it means your share of the supply shrinks a little every year unless you lock up AVAX yourself and earn the rewards.
Source: DefiLlama, Avalanche whitepaper
A cap that holders can vote to change
The paper sets a limit of 720 million AVAX, with 360 million available at launch. By September 2026, 442 million had been released, about 61% of the cap.
But the cap is not fixed in stone. The same paper says the reward rate is set by governance, and that holders may choose whether AVAX is "eventually capped, uncapped, or even deflationary." So the limit is a promise the community can revise, not a rule the software can never break.
For you, that is a real difference from a coin like Bitcoin. The cap has held so far, but it rests on holders continuing to want it.
Source: Avalanche whitepaper, DefiLlama
Who got the coins
Not all AVAX was earned. A large share was set aside at launch.
Of the AVAX released so far, about 44.5% went to what DefiLlama groups as insiders: the team, the foundation, strategic partners and a community and developer fund. Public sales took 16.3%, private and seed sales 9.7%, an airdrop 4.1%, and staking rewards the other 25.1%. Once the scheduled releases finish, the insider share of the total comes to about 47.8%.
The last scheduled releases belong to the foundation: about 1.67 million AVAX every three months from October 2026 into 2030. That is a schedule for when coins unlock, not a record of who still holds them or who has sold.
For you, it means close to half of all AVAX started with people close to the project. Nothing in the record shows them dumping it, but the record cannot show that either way.
Source: DefiLlama
No break in the chain itself
Avalanche has run since 2020 without an attack on the network itself in the record.
Two apps built on it were hacked, Vee Finance and Stars Arena. Those were flaws in those apps, the way a shop can be robbed without the business park's gate failing. A criminal network also called "Avalanche" was taken down by police, but it has nothing to do with this chain.
For you, the base layer's record is clean. The apps on top of it carry their own risks, as they do on every platform.
Source: Vee Finance exploit, Stars Arena exploit, Lawfare
The money parked on the chain
People deposit money into apps on Avalanche for lending and trading. That total, called total value locked, or TVL, is one measure of how much a chain is used.
Avalanche's figure peaked at $11.5 billion on 2 December 2021. It stood at $603 million on 25 September 2026, down 94.8%. It climbed back to about $2.3 billion in October 2025, then fell to about $413 million in July 2026 before recovering a little.
For you, the chain is still in real use, and hundreds of millions of dollars sit in its apps. But the money that arrived in the 2021 boom has mostly left.
Source: DefiLlama
The price, against the earning
In June 2026 the market valued all AVAX at $3.85 billion, the 31st largest coin. Fees are running at $1.6 million a year. The price is about 2,355 times what the network earns in a year.
In everyday terms, that is like paying $2,355 for a vending machine that takes in one dollar a year. The price is from June and the fees are from September, so treat the comparison as approximate.
For a platform, that gap is a bet on future use. Buyers are paying for the network they expect Avalanche to be, not the one its fees show today.
What Hold means for someone holding AVAX
The case in favour is real. Avalanche is an open, working platform with software built in public, a clean record at the network level, and a fee design where nobody takes a cut. Its rules are set out in writing and changed by vote, and the chain is still in daily use.
The case against is about size and edge. The network earns about $1.6 million a year against a price near $4 billion, and it is paid for almost entirely by new coins. Its activity sits far below its peaks, and nothing in the record shows an advantage that rivals cannot copy.
Hold does not mean safe. It means there is no reason in the record to sell, and not enough in it yet to add with confidence.
Hold is what that combination is worth, and it is a close call. It is an honest platform with nothing hidden in how fees work, whose use has shrunk while its price has not. If apps and new chains bring activity back, fees will show it first.
ROI through the years
Bought and held to 25 September 2026, never traded. AVAX has only traded since September 2020, so the top row is everything since it started trading rather than a ten-year answer.
Bought at listing, September 2020
+100%
Bought 5 years ago, September 2021
−84%
Bought 3 years ago, September 2023
+18%
The worst drop in the first two rows is the same fall: a slide from $134.84 in November 2021 to $5.90 in June 2026, over four and a half years rather than one crash. All three rows agree with a second venue to within about 1.3%.
Returns and falls are measured on daily closing prices, so a one-minute crash that did not settle cannot enter them. The worst drop is the largest peak-to-trough fall inside that row's window, not the token's all-time worst. Bars sit on a log scale of what one dollar became. Sources: Binance, Coinbase, Gate.io.
What could not be answered
Five questions about Avalanche stay open on this page, because the information needed to answer them was not available.
Fees beyond the C-Chain. The public fee record covers only the main app chain. Fees and burns on Avalanche's other chains and on the separate L1s are not measured.
Fees before November 2022. The record starts late, so the network's income in the 2021 boom is missing.
How AVAX is spread across its holders. Who owns how much, and whether early holders have been buying or selling, was not part of the data that could be read.
What rights holders have. The public page that lists token rights could not be read, so this page makes no claim about them either way.
Staking rewards from here on. The public record tracks rewards only up to September 2026. After that it is not modelled, which does not mean rewards stop.
Karinva takes no payment from any project it covers.