Avalanche Foundation Names Six Research Grantees From 175+

The Avalanche Foundation named six research teams on Nov. 11 under its first Call for Research Proposals, according to its announcement. More than 175 proposals were submitted, about 90 went to full committee review, and six were funded. Each of the six is a funded study; the post reports no results.

What the six teams will study

The post sorts the projects into the program's two tracks. Two sit under Cryptoasset Pricing and Valuation, and four under Validator Economics and Network Security, the announcement says.

Cryptoasset Pricing and Valuation:

• "Financial Application Value Accrual in Layer-1 Blockchain Economies: Design Lessons for Avalanche L1s," led by Ruizhe Jia of Stanford University with Xinmeng Zeng, David Dai and Jipeng (Tony) Liu. The post describes it as a study of how value from trading and lending applications reaches the underlying chain.
• "Staking, Token Valuation, and Platform Evolution," led by Lin William Cong of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) with Zhiheng He of Renmin University of China. It models staking as a feedback loop between liquidity, security and platform productivity.

Validator Economics and Network Security:

• "The Macroeconomics of Decentralisation in Proof-of-Stake Blockchains," led by Fayçal Drissi of the University of Oxford and the Oxford-Man Institute with Zachary Feinstein of Stevens Institute of Technology and Basil Williams of Imperial College London. It treats a proof-of-stake network as a small open economy and compares inflation-based and fee-based reward designs.
• "From Inflationary Rewards to Fee-Based Security: Value Accrual, L1 Validator Fees, and Sustainable Validator Incentives in Avalanche under ACP-77," from Cong, Yonggang Wen and Wilfried Ariel Mulyawan, all of NTU. It uses a model calibrated to live Avalanche data to ask whether L1 fees could fund validator security.
• "Priority-Rule Credibility, Fee Burning, and Validator Security in Avalanche," by Enchuan Shao of the University of Saskatchewan. It examines whether the C-Chain's priority-fee ordering holds when burned fees give validators no direct incentive to enforce it.
• "Assessing Validator Opportunity Costs in Proof-of-Stake Networks," from Cong of NTU, Siguang Li and Xuechao Wang of HKUST Guangzhou. It builds a framework for the return validators need to stay committed.

Cong appears on three of the six projects. The post says each was selected independently on its own merit.

Two of the titles concern how value from L1 activity reaches the network: the Jia project on application value accrual, and the ACP-77 project on L1 validator fees. For the Foundation's own stated framework on how it wants AVAX to capture value, see our Sept. 5 piece, Avalanche Foundation Spells Out How It Wants AVAX to Capture Value.

Who chose the grantees

The Foundation's selection committee, introduced in a May 21 post, has six members. Three come from the Foundation and Ava Labs: Emin Gün Sirer, founder and CEO of Ava Labs; Matias A., the Foundation's chief investment officer; and Eric Lu, its lead economist. The other three are academics: Campbell Harvey, professor of finance at Duke University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; Fahad Saleh, a professor at the University of Florida and cryptoeconomics advisor at Columbia University's Center for Digital Finance and Technologies; and Agostino Capponi, a professor at Columbia University and director of that center.

According to the grantee post, reviewers scored each proposal independently on relevance, concreteness, novelty, method, actionability, feasibility and team strength, and members recused themselves where they had a prior professional relationship with an applicant. The Foundation wrote that about 170 applicants were not selected and each was contacted individually.

Program terms and what comes next

The Foundation opened the program on April 29, offering grants of "up to $50,000 USD" per selected proposal. The grantee post does not state what any of the six teams received. The opening post lists payment in three milestones over 12 months, with grantees keeping full intellectual property rights and free to publish, subject to a six-month exclusivity period for each deliverable.

The grantee post says the research may take up to a year and that the Foundation plans to share updates on each project as the work progresses. It also plans an Economics of Blockchain Roundtable video series over the coming months, with early episodes introducing each funded team alongside committee guests; dates are to be announced in advance. "Our research agenda already has real momentum, and this program is designed to accelerate it," Matias A. said in the post.