Avalanche Foundation Picks Six Teams From 175 to Study AVAX Economics

The Avalanche Foundation has selected six research teams from more than 175 applications in the first round of its Call for Research Proposals, with grants of up to $50,000 per project. The winning researchers come from Stanford University, the University of Oxford, Imperial College London and Nanyang Technological University, according to the Foundation's announcement.

The program targets two areas of network economics: cryptoasset pricing and valuation, and validator economics and network security. In plain terms, the Foundation is paying academics to answer a question every proof-of-stake operator eventually faces — whether a network can keep its validators honest without printing new tokens to pay them.

What does this change for practitioners?

Several of the selected projects examine whether validator rewards on Avalanche could shift from newly issued tokens toward network fees. That question sits at the center of current tokenomics debates across proof-of-stake chains. Issuance-funded rewards dilute holders; fee-funded rewards depend entirely on network usage. A credible answer either way would inform how validators model their long-term revenue and how protocols schedule emission reductions.

One selected study, according to the Foundation, uses a model built on live Avalanche data to examine whether the fees Layer 1s pay under ACP-77 could support a transition to fee-based validator security. ACP-77 is the Avalanche proposal that governs how sovereign subnets — now L1s — compensate the primary network's validators. If fee income under that framework can realistically replace issuance, the finding would matter well beyond Avalanche, since most major proof-of-stake networks face the same structural question.

The other listed projects cover complementary ground:

• A Stanford study on how application value, such as trading fees, accrues in Layer 1 blockchains — effectively asking where value capture happens in the stack.
• An Oxford project on the macroeconomics of decentralisation in proof-of-stake networks.

The Foundation has not published a fixed timeline for the research output or a deadline for a second round. The first round itself drew more than 175 applications for six spots — an acceptance rate below 4 percent, which signals meaningful academic demand for funded work in this field.

For validators, subnet operators and token holders, the practical stakes are straightforward. A documented, data-grounded case for fee-based security would strengthen arguments for lower issuance and give L1 builders a benchmark for what their fee structures must sustain. A case against it would push the conversation toward hybrid reward models instead.

The Foundation's decision to fund external, university-affiliated research rather than in-house analysis also matters for credibility: results from Stanford, Oxford, Imperial College London and Nanyang Technological University will carry peer-review weight that marketing materials cannot.

The next observable milestone is the publication of the first round's findings, which will determine whether the fee-security question moves from speculation to evidence — and whether the Foundation commits to a second funding round.