First published 25 September 2020, the week mainnet opened. Expanded in October 2026 for the rename of subnets to L1s, and for the shorter validator lock that began in September 2026. Avalanche is a network of chains that share a consensus family and a coin. AVAX is that coin. You pay fees with it, and you stake it if you want to validate or delegate. The primary network is three chains, not one. Sending on the wrong one is the ordinary loss.
Emin Gün Sirer and Ava Labs brought the mainnet up on 21 September 2020. The cap written into the design is 720 million AVAX. New coins are staking rewards, not a miner’s subsidy, and they stop when the cap is reached. A reward is not a reason the price must rise.
Three chains, one ticker
The C-Chain runs smart contracts in the Ethereum style. Addresses there start with 0x. They are not Ethereum addresses. The same hex on Ethereum is a different notebook, and a token bridged onto the C-Chain is not the token on Ethereum. The X-Chain is for creating and sending Avalanche assets, and it uses a note-like model rather than one running account. The P-Chain is where validators, delegators, and the list of other chains are recorded. X-Chain and P-Chain addresses look like X-avax1… and P-avax1…. A wallet that hides the chain name and shows only AVAX has not made them one balance.
Moving AVAX between the three is an export and an import, two steps. People call that a cross-chain transfer. It is still inside Avalanche. It is not a bridge to Ethereum. The wrong network is still the wrong city, and here the wrong city can wear the same logo.
Subnets became L1s
A subnet was a validator set that could run its own chain, with its own rules. After the December 2024 upgrade those chains are called Avalanche L1s. The primary network is still the three chains above. An L1 can use AVAX or some other coin for its own fees. A token on an L1 is not AVAX, even when the marketing says the Avalanche ecosystem. Read which chain the deposit page named.
Staking, including the 2026 change
Validating on the primary network has long required staking 2,000 AVAX. Delegating has long required 25. Those are amounts to check on the staking screen, because a parameter can move. On 22 September 2026 the Helicon upgrade cut the minimum validator period on mainnet from two weeks to 48 hours, for validations that start after the upgrade. Delegators still wait a minimum of two weeks. New validations are judged against a 90 percent uptime bar. Validations already running kept the old 80 percent bar. A blog post that says “two weeks for everyone” is describing the network from before that date. Staking is a lock and a queue, not a savings account.
Nothing here is an instruction to buy, validate, or bridge AVAX.
