Avalanche Foundation Selects Six Teams for Blockchain Economics Research

The Avalanche Foundation selected six research teams to study blockchain economics, including cryptoasset valuation and proof-of-stake incentives, with findings expected to inform Avalanche’s development and governance over the next year.

The Foundation’s inaugural research call drew more than 175 submissions. About 90 proposals advanced to full committee review before six were chosen. The selection criteria included relevance, methodological rigor, novelty, feasibility and team qualifications.

The independent committee included Emin Gün Sirer, CEO of Ava Labs; Matias A., chief investment officer of the Avalanche Foundation; Campbell Harvey of Duke University; and Agostino Capponi of Columbia University. Committee members reviewed submissions independently.

The selected work covers two areas: how cryptoassets gain value and how validator rewards affect network security. In one study, Ruizhe Jia of Stanford University and his team will examine value created by applications on Layer 1 blockchains, including trading fees, and how it contributes to the broader ecosystem. Lin William Cong of Nanyang Technological University and collaborators will study links among staking, liquidity, network security and platform productivity, including the shift from token-based rewards to fee-based rewards.

The validator economics projects focus on proof-of-stake networks, where reward design is tied to network security. Fayçal Drissi of the University of Oxford and his team will model these networks as small open economies and examine tradeoffs between inflation-based and fee-based rewards. A separate study led by Cong will use Avalanche network data to assess whether fee structures under ACP-77 can maintain validator incentives as token issuance declines.

Together, the projects address how application activity, staking and reward systems relate to blockchain value and security. Their findings are expected to contribute to Avalanche development and governance during the coming year.