Avalanche (AVAX) Burn

Lifetime burn to 1 Sep 2026: 5,054,873 AVAX, accumulated over 2,146 fee-paying days on the C-chain since mainnet on 23 Sep 2020 (the first 102 days of 2020 burned just 430 AVAX in total). Against 474.06M AVAX issued per current P-chain supply (360M genesis + 114.06M staking rewards), the burn is 1.07% — Avalanche burns every fee, but fees on Avalanche have always been small.

Most of the burning happened when AVAX was several times more expensive than through 2026 (2022: 1.48M AVAX at $15–90; Dec 2023: 1.29M at $35–45), so the dollar value at burn time was far higher — this ledger has no per-day price series attached for AVAX, so it gives ranges rather than a sum.

The "burned" cell in the state table is not from CoinGecko or an explorer but the sum of this page's own daily series; total supply = current P-chain supply − total burn. CoinGecko lists total supply at 463.44M, 5.6M below this ledger's 469.0M — the difference lies in how CoinGecko treats burns and P-chain supply; the ledger keeps the on-chain figure.

December 2023 burned 1,290,338 AVAX — 25.5% of six years of burning, and 2.8× all of 2024. The cause was the inscription craze (the ASC-20 standard mimicking Ordinals) spilling onto the C-chain: from 13 Dec to 21 Dec 2023 the daily series reads 20,773 → 37,950 → 90,115 → 172,868 → 127,516 → 172,539 → 168,664 → 244,407 (20 Dec, the all-time record) → 102,511 AVAX. Nine days sum to 1,137,343 AVAX, 22.5% of the lifetime total, at prices around $40 — roughly $45M of fees destroyed in little over a week.

Outside that craze, the largest days are far more modest: 22 Nov 2023 45,978 AVAX (the first inscription wave), 11 May 2022 29,512 (the LUNA/UST collapse day), and 10 Oct 2025 25,155 — the market-wide record liquidation day, also the biggest day since 2023. The pattern across the three: AVAX burns hard when the network is congested by speculation or panic, not when "real" activity grows.

November 2023 (132,142 AVAX) and April–July 2023 (74–114K per month) are the two secondary peaks. Without the craze, 2023 burned roughly 600K AVAX — on par with 2021; put differently, nearly 70% of 2023's 2.02M was two months of inscriptions.

By year: 2021 592,676 AVAX (1,624/day); 2022 1,475,663 (4,043/day — the priciest year on a steady basis, with Mar–May 2022 at 227–342K per month on Avalanche DeFi and Avalanche Rush); 2023 2,020,520 (5,536/day, distorted by December); 2024 463,681 (1,267/day); 2025 371,332 (1,017/day); 2026 to 1 Sep 130,571 (535/day). From 2022 to 2026, the daily burn rate fell 87%.

The technical break is the Avalanche9000 (Etna) upgrade activated 16 Dec 2024, cutting the C-chain minimum base fee from 25 to 1 nAVAX. The monthly series shows it at once: Nov 2024 42,331 AVAX, Dec 2024 36,104, then Jan 2025 down to 11,528 (372/day, −68% month over month). Since then the norm is 10–25K per month, spiking only on market turbulence: Oct 2025 69,864 (thanks to 10 Oct), Sep 2025 49,674, Jun 2025 39,994.

2026 is lower still: Jan 24,000; Feb 24,898; Mar 16,342; Apr 14,163; May 9,448 (lowest since 2020); Jun 16,442; Jul 9,005; Aug 15,792. The lowest day since 2025: 2 May 2026 at just 109 AVAX, i.e. under $800 of fees for the entire C-chain in a day — the trailing 12 months burned 311,337 AVAX in total.

Current P-chain supply is 474.06M AVAX, meaning 114.06M have been minted as staking rewards since the 360M genesis — 22.6× the amount burned. The cap is 720M; roughly 246M of rewards remain to be issued at a rate set by staking participation. Over the trailing 12 months the ledger records 10.70M AVAX minted versus 311K burned: burning offsets 2.9% of issuance, net supply grew ~10.4M, about 2.2% per year.

The Mint column has two sources, labeled in the table: from 29 Aug 2026 it is measured directly — the difference in P-chain supply (platform.getCurrentSupply) between two snapshots a day apart, which swings widely because rewards pay out when staking periods end (e.g. 30 Aug: 105,995; 29 Aug: 12,779; 1 Sep: 85,556). Earlier history uses DefiLlama's emission-schedule model, summing to 109.3M through Aug 2026 — about 4.8M below the on-chain 114.06M, showing the model misses some rewards; the ledger keeps the model for history because past P-chain supply cannot be queried.

For AVAX to deflate it would need >10M burned per year, i.e. ~29K AVAX daily — a level reached only during the nine inscription days of Dec 2023 and two crisis days in 2022/2025. With a 1 nAVAX base fee after Avalanche9000 that scenario is all but closed: Avalanche chose cheap fees for subnets/L1s over heavy burning, and this page measures exactly the consequence of that choice.

The ledger has no unlock source for AVAX: the 2020–2024 team/foundation vesting schedule has ended per the published tokenomics, and the Unlocks column is empty for lack of an on-chain source, not an absolute zero. Circulating supply is 431.77M (CoinGecko) versus 469.0M total — the 37M gap is foundation/partner AVAX that CoinGecko's method excludes from circulation.

ATH $144.96 on 21 Nov 2021, ATL $2.80 on 31 Dec 2020 (CoinGecko). From the peak to early September 2026 the price fell 95% while supply rose 30% (360 → 469M) and burning offsets just 1%: for AVAX, the supply story is the staking-reward story, not the fee-burn story.

The daily burn series comes from the feesPaid endpoint of metrics.avax.network for chain 43114 (C-chain), total fees per UTC day — since 100% of fees are destroyed, fees = burn. The ledger cross-checked against a one-off Dune query when building history: it matched to the decimal, so daily collection uses only the official API. P-chain and X-chain fees (very small) are not in this series.

Total supply is read from the P-chain via platform.getCurrentSupply daily, minus cumulative burn; the Mint column from 29 Aug 2026 is the difference between two such reads. There is no revenue, buyback, or unlock column for AVAX. If the official API is unavailable a day is left blank rather than estimated — the series currently holds 2,146 days with no gap since 23 Sep 2020.