Avalanche Foundation Mission Statement and Reminder About System Unlocks

Avalanche

The Avalanche Foundation is an active and cornerstone member and supporter of the Avalanche community. The Board of Directors recently adopted a formal mission statement as follows: “To create a sustainable ecosystem around the Avalanche public blockchain that encourages innovative projects, collaborative and composable activities, and cutting-edge research that results in the digitization of all the world’s assets.” To that end, the Avalanche Foundation contributes to the continuing development, implementation, and maintenance of the Avalanche public network and the Avalanche community by funding (through grants and investments), publicizing, and otherwise encouraging the following, among other things:

developing and implementing different types of software, such as smart contracts and dApps, Subnets, APIs, utilities and upgrades, bridges to other blockchains, and wallet software;
staking tokens and operating nodes/validators;
creating written, video, and other content on websites, various social media platforms, and elsewhere; and
generally being an overall resource to the Avalanche community in various ways.

The Avalanche Foundation is a non-profit organization, but some activities may generate revenue or investment returns. These are reinvested in the Avalanche community overall and used to pay service providers and others who support the growth of the Avalanche ecosystem.

The composition of the Board of Directors of the Avalanche Foundation is changing, and more communication in this regard and in respect of other matters will follow in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, the Foundation would like to remind the community about system unlocks and its staking of AVAX tokens.

At the Avalanche mainnet launch in September 2020, the Avalanche Foundation and various other stakeholder groups agreed to a programmatic unlock schedule for the tokens they received in the genesis vertex.

Unlocking schedules are typical for almost all projects with tokens. In the case of Avalanche, they were disclosed upfront so that participants and other stakeholders could anticipate the unlock events. Before unlocking, locked tokens cannot be transferred to any other account but are available for staking to help secure the network.

The Avalanche Foundation generally stakes around 90% or more of its AVAX (both locked and unlocked) to help secure the network. Because locked tokens cannot be used to transact, the Avalanche Foundation elects to stake for longer durations (10 months or more, up to the system maximum). By staking its locked and unlocked tokens, the Avalanche Foundation remains a productive validator, demonstrating its commitment to the network and the community. Due to this commitment, the Avalanche Foundation’s practice is to re-stake the majority of tokens released after the conclusion of a staking period.

Per the programmatic unlock schedule, the system automatically unlocks approximately 9.5 million Avalanche Foundation AVAX every three months until August 2024, when the number goes down to approximately 1.7 million AVAX every three months until July 19, 2030. Because of the practices described above, the tokens that will be part of the November 2023 and February 2024 unlocks are currently staked through early Q2 2024 and, thus, will not be part of the circulating supply upon unlock.

What about staking rewards? Most of the Avalanche Foundation’s rewards are also staked. However, a portion is kept available to accomplish the mission, which needs tokens and fiat currency funding. More information can be found here.

Avalanche Foundation appreciates the vibrant community around the Avalanche network and remains committed to its mission.

About Avalanche

Avalanche is a smart contracts platform that scales infinitely and regularly finalizes transactions in less than one second. Its novel consensus protocol, Subnet infrastructure, and HyperSDK toolkit enable Web3 developers to easily launch powerful, custom blockchain solutions. Build anything you want, any way you want, on the eco-friendly blockchain designed for Web3 devs.