Avalanche burns a record $18 million worth of AVAX in a week

Over the past week, the volume of burned fees on the C-Chain blockchain Avalanche reached 438,877 AVAX (~$18.1 million at the time of writing). The metric was more than ten times higher than in the previous period.

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The C-Chain employs an implementation based on the Ethereum EIP-1559 proposal. The network, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, implemented it in 2021 during the London hard fork. But unlike Ethereum, in Avalanche the entire fee is burned, not a dynamically determined portion.

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A spike in the rate of tokens leaving circulation occurred around mid‑November — over the week the supply of AVAX fell by 85,533 coins. The on‑chain activity spike to record levels at that time was largely explained by the emergence of the Ordinals analogue Ordinals.

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But whereas in November the maximum daily fees from inscriptions on the ASC-20 transactions amounted to about $797,000, by December 16 the figure had exceeded $5.6 million. Avalanche significantly outpaces other EVM networks in spending on such operations.

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Over the past week, inscription-related transactions on the blockchain accounted for 89% of the total, and users spent 75% of the gas on them.

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At the same time, Avalanche trails Polygon PoS and BNB Chain in the total number of transactions processed with Ordinals-analogues and in the number of active collections.

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Over the last 30 days, the price of AVAX rose by 90% (CoinGecko). However, against a backdrop of record gas costs and fee burning, momentum slowed — only +1.5% for the week. As of writing, the token trades around $40.

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The asset holds 10th place in CoinGecko’s market cap ranking, with a figure of $14.9 billion. In circulation is almost 366 million AVAX out of a total supply of 433.8 million tokens.

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In early November, Ava Labs, the company behind Avalanche, laid off 12% of its staff.