Ava Labs builds Avalanche's software, and the Avalanche Foundation funds and grows the ecosystem around it. Ava Labs is a software company, founded in 2018, that develops the network's core i
Ava Labs builds Avalanche's software, and the Avalanche Foundation funds and grows the ecosystem around it.
Ava Labs is a software company, founded in 2018, that develops the network's core infrastructure and provides services to the Foundation. The Avalanche Foundation is a non-profit that launched the public network and runs grant, research, and economic programs.
Avalanche is a Layer 1 blockchain that launched its mainnet in September 2020. Its primary network runs three chains:
AVAX, the native token, pays fees and is staked by validators. Its supply is capped at 720 million tokens.
Ava Labs is the engineering company behind Avalanche. Emin Gün Sirer, its founder and CEO, started it with two PhD candidates to build the blockchain for the financial industry. It is based in New York City and backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital.
Ava Labs develops the core software that runs Avalanche. Its developer relations team also documents network upgrades. The latest, Helicon, activated on September 22, 2026. Key changes include:
ACP stands for Avalanche Community Proposal, the process used to propose changes to the protocol.
Ava Labs' solutions engineers help institutions and businesses onboard to Avalanche. Organizations building on the network include JPMorgan Chase, Apollo, FIFA, and the State of Wyoming, according to Ava Labs. On September 18, Ava Labs said the New York Stock Exchange had spent about a year testing Avalanche technology as it weighs tokenizing shares and exchange-traded funds.
On August 18, 2026, Ava Labs named former chief operating officer Charley Cooper as president, in charge of day-to-day operations. John Wu, the previous president, became a senior advisor, and Lydia Chiu was promoted to chief financial officer.
The Avalanche Foundation describes its job as supporting "the long-term growth, decentralization, and resilience of the Avalanche network." It funds builders and studies the network's economics.
The Foundation runs Retro9000, a retroactive grant program with up to $40 million available. Retroactive means teams are paid after they show results on mainnet, not before. In June 2025, it awarded more than $1 million to 19 projects based on traction and technical delivery. In a later round, it named six more grantees sharing $160,000. Community members who refer funded projects can earn between $500 and $10,000 in AVAX.
The Foundation also leads research on how the network creates and shares value. At Avalanche Summit 2026 in New York on September 16, its chief investment officer presented a three-step framework, "measure, capture, distribute":
The work matters because staking rewards come from a remaining genesis allocation, not newly created tokens, and will shrink over time. The Foundation has also introduced a metric called Gross Chain Product to track output across the network.
The Foundation has also raised money by selling AVAX. In September 2021, it sold $230 million in AVAX to a group of investors that included Polychain Capital and Three Arrows Capital.
The split is easiest to see in a single upgrade. Ava Labs engineers write and document a change like Helicon. It is proposed through ACPs, and validators adopt it by running the new software. The Foundation funds teams that build on the upgraded network and studies how upgrades affect AVAX's economics.
Institutional deals tend to involve Ava Labs. On October 14, 2026, the courts of Dubai's financial center, the DIFC Courts, began recording a cryptographic fingerprint of each court order on the Avalanche C-Chain. Sensitive case details stay offchain. Ava Labs Chief Business Officer John Nahas called it "purpose-built infrastructure" that institutions can adopt without changing how people use their services.
AVAX traded at $9.76 on October 19, down 11.4% over seven days, per CoinGecko. It has a market cap of $4.33 billion, ranking 27th, with 443.6 million tokens in circulation. It sits 93.3% below its all-time high of $144.96.
Ava Labs and the Avalanche Foundation split Avalanche's work into two parts. Ava Labs builds and maintains the core software, including the Helicon upgrade, and handles institutional onboarding such as the DIFC Courts deployment. The Foundation runs grant programs such as Retro9000, leads research on AVAX tokenomics, and supports ecosystem growth. Network changes pass through Avalanche Community Proposals before validators adopt them.
