AVAX Down 92%: Why Avalanche Adoption Hasn't Lifted the Coin

Black Rockck put one of its funds on it. FIFA built its own blockchain on it. And in July 2026, a company that had just listed on the New York Stock Exchange put its own shares on it. It's called Avalanche. And the coin behind it, Avac, is down about 92% from its high.

So, what happened to Avac? The big money is using Avalanche. So, why hasn't the coin gone with it? There's a catch and it's rarely explained properly. I'll give you the honest answer and it doesn't come from me.

It comes from the Avalanche Foundation itself on stage in September 2026. And the man who started all of this, he helped design a digital currency years before Bitcoin even existed. Here he is.

So that was the genesis of the karma currency in 2002. It was peer- reviewed and published in 2003. and um it has proof of work minting in it. So one of the key components that uh is in Bitcoin was also in karma about 6 years before Bitcoin came along.

Like [snorts] if you're bullish, let's run it. [music] His name is Erin Gunsara and for years he was a computer science professor at Cornell, one of America's top universities. Karma was a digital currency he designed with two colleagues and it used proof of work the same kind of puzzle Bitcoin's mining is built on his pointed to it himself on X quoting the line from the paper that describes a puzzle. Then in 2013 he and a colleague it published a paper showing that a group of Bitcoin miners could gain the system to earn more than their fair share. a professor poking holes in Bitcoin itself. Not everyone thanked him for it, so he built something different, a new way for computers to agree on transactions fast without miners at all. That became Avalanche.

He co-founded a company to build it. You know, Ava Labs. In July 2020, the AVAC token sale raised $42 million in under 5 hours. and the network went live on the 21st of September 2020. Then came the 2021 boom. [snorts] In November 2021, AVAC hit its all-time high about $145 a coin. And then 2022 happened.

The whole market fell apart and AVAC fell with it. In early October 2026, it's trading at around $11. That's roughly 92% below the top. If you bought anywhere near the top, you know exactly what that feels like. And here's a bit that makes it sting even more.

While the price was sinking, the biggest names in finance were quietly moving in. November 2023, JP Morgan's blockchain arm Onyx ran a test with Apollo, the giant investment firm and Wisdom Tree using a private chain built on Avalanche under a project run by Singapore Central Bank. November 2024, Black Rockck's tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, added Avalanche. December 2024, Avalanche ships an upgrade called Avalanche 9000, which made it far cheaper for companies to launch their own chain on it. May 2025, FIFA announces it's building the FIFA blockchain on Avalanche.

And here's the boss of the Avalanche Treasury Company on what they did with it.

Um, they FIFA spun up their own L1 on Avalanche, right? And one of the issues in ticketing broadly, whether it's sporting events or concerts, is you know, you sell these tickets, scalpers buy them up, they resell them on ticket master, uh that that premium doesn't go, you know, it's a cost for the consumer. It does not go to the event sponsor or the athlete or the performer. And so they issued as kind of like a beta test uh 100,000 right to buy tickets on the Avalanche uh on their Avalanche L1. August 2025, Wyoming launches the first stable coin issued by an American state called FRNT and Avalanche is one of the chains it runs on.

And then July 2026, Securitize, the company that helps BlackRock put funds on chain, lists on the New York Stock Exchange. And on the same day, it puts its own shares on chain. ticker symbol SECZ. It's going to be available available in tokenized form. What does that mean? Is it like a stock?

Yes. So, so you can buy the the the the shares of uh sexy of the company on uh you know through any traditional brokerage account through the the New York Stock Exchange or you can buy them uh on blockchain technology using a wallet and using stable coins and you get a token that represents exactly the same, you know, shares of the security license as if you were buy them in traditional rails. And where did those tokens go? Well, here's Carlos Domingo again on CoinDesk the day it listed.

Uh securitized tokenized shares. We have uh close to $300 million uh on shares. It's going to become the largest uh tokenized stock uh in the industry and it's a real stock. By the way, the token does represent the same stock as the securityiz also available for trading. Uh we are tokenizing both in on avalanche and on Salana.

The trading happens on the on the Solana blockchain. Notice that last line, Avalanche and Salana and the trading happens on Salana. Remember that because it matters later. So why do these firms keep picking Avalanche? Well, back to Bartsmith.

Avalanche was designed for the flexibility for people to spin up their own L1 and for them to create their own, you know, rules around compliance and KYC and and and what they view to be the way that they interpret these CFTC and SEC rules. So I think the biggest

takeaway from my conversations is people don't want a chain, they want their chain. Like they want to build their own chain.

People don't want a chain, they want their chain. That's the whole pitch. A bank doesn't want its customers business sitting on a public network anyone can look through. With Avalanche, it can run its own private chain with its own rules and still connect to other Avalanche chains. So here's the question every AVAC holder should be asking.

If all of this is happening, why is the coin down 92%. Ava Lab's own president, John Woo, put it like this on CNBC in February 2026.

And what's happening is, you know, blockchain has gone from crypto assets to enterprise technology. You are really seeing the adoption through stable coin. The DTCC in the US is now tokenizing securities. You know, JP Morgan has a JP Morgan coin. So the adoption is literally happening.

It's just the asset class is rationalizing itself.

The adoption is literally happening and I believe it. But adoption of the network and the price of the coin are two different things. And the most honest explanation I've heard of why came from the Avalanche Foundation itself at its own summit in New York.

No chain funds its security sustainably. Full stop. No layer one. Let me pause there because this is this is a big statement. It's basically saying that sustainability of the long term of the chain is just not possible based on the current economics and value acral process that the token has.

And why is that? And why does it matter? Well, I mean why it matters I think is rather obvious at this point. But why is that? And the first pro the first observation that we had was this. activity is going up unambiguously.

It doesn't matter which chain you're talking about. Almost all of them have this this feature. But yet revenue has been decreasing for the chain. What is going on here? How how can this be even explained?

How is it that the success of the chain that is having it's not being reflected in the revenue that it's capturing?

That's a foundation saying it out loud. activity up, revenue down. Not just on Avalanche, on almost every chain. And here's why. In plain English, okay? Every chain is fighting for business.

So, they all race to be cheaper. Cheaper is great for the companies using them, but every time you use Avalanch's main public chain, the fee is burnt, gone for good. And the less people pay in fees, the less AVAC gets burnt. Meanwhile, the people who run the network get rewarded mostly in newly created AVAC. The foundation said that bluntly as well, right, later in the same talk.

Inflation pays the validators and if you hold AVAC without staking it, you're the one paying for that because there are more coins around. And remember Bart's point about banks wanting their own chain. When a company runs its own chain on Avalanche, it does pay a small ongoing fee to the main network in AVAC. But it's not buying billions of dollars of Avac to do it. Banks using Avalanche is not the same thing as banks buying AVAC.

To be fair, the bulls have an answer. Avac has a hard cap of 720 million coins and about 443 million are in circulation. So if activity ever gets big enough, the burning starts to bite. Here's Bartsmith making that case. And bear in mind, his company holds Avac.

Many of these L1s slash their prices down to make it next to free to transact on that. And that allows, you know, nient businesses, applications they're building on top of the Avalanche ecosystem to grow without a tremendous amount of cost. At some point there is a push and pull from that dynamic about trying to have revenue acrue back to the chain in the form of avalanche it. It is used to burn tokens because unlike many other chains there is a fixed number of AVAC tokens. So

trying to create a a balance between allowing businesses to grow on the ecosystem without burdensome fees but then when you have adoption and there's a lot of economic activity that econ e economic activity leads to burning of the tokens so that the value of the AVAC token goes up and I think

so that's a bet lots of activity eventually means lots of burning the catch is the word eventually nobody can tell you when or whether the fees get big enough and there's one more story from Emmen that stuck with me because it's about something every one of us should think about here he is describing a letter from his own bank a bank he'd been with for 15 years

got it. I opened it up and there was a nondescript little letter from my bank that I had used for maybe a decade and a half and uh I had a mortgage with him with with that bank and in fact the bank's regional manager had called me up maybe two months ago and said you're one of our top clients and uh anything you want let me know we'll do anything da da da he was he was being so nice to me because uh you know I had raised some funding for Ava Labs and I was keeping all of those funds in the most secure most uh uh you conservative investment vehicle which meant that we didn't really get much you know interest on that money. They they collected a lot of uh you know a lot of value off of that. So I was I was doing things very conservatively. They loved me for it and uh and so that same bank sent me a letter that said um you are no longer going to be our customer.

Uh please come to the the the bank to to collect a cashier's check for the remaining balance and go somewhere else.

A top client and then one letter and then he's out. He says he later found out it was part of a wider push against people in crypto at the time. Whatever you think about that, here is a lesson. If someone else holds your money, someone else decides when you can use it. And that's true of your coins, too.

So, here's a test you can do as soon as this video is finished. Two questions. One, where's your AVAC actually sitting? If it's on an exchange, the exchange holds it, not you. Two, why do you own it?

If your honest answer is because big banks use Avalanche, you've just seen that's not the same as big banks buying AVAC. If either answer makes you a little bit uneasy, that's worth fixing before the next big move, not after. Am I telling you to go and buy Avac? No. There could well be better opportunities for your situation.

And that's exactly what I'd want someone to talk through with you. So, click the first link in the description, fill in the short form, and book your free 15-minute call. You'll speak to one of the team about your own strategy and your own situation. It costs nothing. You just fill in the form first, then choose a time that suits you.

On your phone, tap more under the video and it's the first link there. Do it now, get it booked, then come back to me. Because coming up is how big investors can get AVAC through the stock market without holding a coin themselves and the one thing a lot of holders are waiting for that might never come. On the 26th of January 2026, VADC launched the first spot AVX ETF in America. Ticker Vavx.

VanX Fund can stake its AVAC 2, which means locking coins up to help run the network in return for rewards. Then on the 15th of April 2026, Bitwise followed with its own AVAC fund on the New York Stock Exchange. Ticker Bava, Bitwise said it would stake around 70% of the funds AVAC, and it launched, it put average staking rewards at around 5.4% a year. Picture what that means, okay? A pension fund or a wealth manager can get AVAC exposure plus staking rewards through a normal brokerage account without ever holding a wallet or a private key.

That's Wall Street's back door into AVAC. And it shows you where the professionals heads are at. They want the exposure and they want someone else handling the keys. And on the 17th of March 2026, America's two big market regulators, the SEC and the CFTC, put out a joint interpretation that named Avac as one of 16 digital commodities alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Salana, and others. That's a big deal because until then, most coins had no official answer on where they stood.

So, the doors are open. ETFs, clearer rules, big names building, and still are around $11. In early October 2026, in fairness to the team, they're not pretending the problem isn't there. On the 22nd of September 2026, Avalanche switched on an upgrade called Helen. Two parts of that matter for holders.

Okay, first, it brings down how many new IVACs get created for stakers phased in over about 90 days. Avalanche's own estimate is that it trims yearly inflation by somewhere between half a percentage point and one point. Not huge, but it's the right direction. Second, the shortest time you can lock up AVAC to help secure the network drop from 14 days to 48 hours. That's aimed squarely at the big funds who don't want their money tied up for 2 weeks.

Now, the other side, because you should hear it, remember securitizes shares. They sit on Avalanche and Salana, but the trading happens on Salana. And on the 16th of September 2026, Circle, the company behind the USDC stable coin, switched on its own blockchain called Ark, not on Avalanche. And here's Bart Smith again being honest about it. Arc, I think that that is an example of like one that could have gone either way.

Like that could have been built on Avalanche. They decided to build their own chain. I think Robin Hood's the same way.

Could have gone either way. That's a risk in one line. The biggest firms in crypto can build their own chains from scratch. Avalanche is betting most companies would rather not. And for plenty of them, that's probably true.

But it's a competition, not a done deal. Some of you are thinking, "Fine, I'll just hold and wait for all this adoption to finally hit the price." And look, it might. Plenty of coins have sat still for years and then moved fast. But you've just heard Avalanche Foundation say activity and revenue haven't been moving together on almost every chain. Waiting for adoption to pump the price isn't a plan.

It's a hope with a long timeline. A plan is three things. Knowing why you hold it in one sentence. Knowing how much of your money it should be so in 90% drop doesn't wreck you. and knowing what would make you change your mind before the market forces you to. If you bought near the top in 2021 without those three, you weren't alone.

So, what happened to Avac? Well, as far as I can see, the technology isn't the problem. A professor who was early to crypto built a network that big money really does use. Okay, so Black Rockck, JP Morgan's Test, FIFA, a stock listed in New York, right? But the coin hasn't captured that success.

And the Avalanche Foundation has as good as said so out loud. Is that a reason to give up on it? Well, not necessarily. They know the problem. They started cutting new supply with Helen and there's a hard cap of 720 million coins.

But it's a reason to stop assuming that good news for Avalanche is automatically good news for your AVAC. Have your say in the comments, okay? Does it option eventually win or is the coin just along for the ride? And look, none of this is financial advice, guys. It's just my take after a lot of digging.

Crypto carries risk, and what's happened before is no guarantee of what comes next. So, stick with me, subscribe, and there's a new one every day. Thanks for watching, guys. Keep your head stacked with purpose, and I will keep you posted.

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