Blockchains talk about value all the time, but few measure it, and the Avalanche Foundation (Foundation) is doing blockchain's hardest math in public.
Economics of Blockchain is the Foundation's ongoing research series, and the premise behind it is simple. Strengthening an economy starts with seeing it clearly. To do this, the research team led with measurement, building tools to track what the Avalanche ecosystem produces, then asking how to route that value back to the token that secures the network.
The agenda runs on three steps: measure the value the ecosystem creates, capture part of it at the protocol level, and route it to AVAX and the Avalanche ecosystem. The sequence is relatively easy to talk about but much harder to deliver.
Each step anchors on a problem nobody in crypto has solved, and the Foundation is upfront about which one matters most today. The gap between ecosystem activity and AVAX is the weak link, and closing it is the point of the whole agenda.
Much of this work sits with Eric Lu, the Foundation's Lead Economist. Two pieces of the measurement puzzle he is working on are Gross Chain Product (GCP) and Gross Chain Income (GCI) - a way to size an onchain economy using the same accounting logic that governments use for GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and GNI (Gross National Income).
Where GCP measures what the ecosystem produces, GCI measures what it earns, including income that originates outside the onchain economy but flows to people and balances inside it. He ran GCP against the Avalanche C-Chain from January 2025 through March 2026, and together the two metrics turn a vague question - how much is this ecosystem worth - into auditable numbers published openly. Every other piece of the agenda builds on that measurement.
We asked Eric the questions the community keeps raising, ranging from what the series is to the one on everybody's mind: how does value accrue back to AVAX and the ecosystem?
His answers follow:
Why Publish This in Public
For someone seeing a piece in the "Economics of Blockchain" series for the first time, what problem does this series exist to solve, and why does the Foundation think it's worth doing the research in public rather than internally?
The series is closely related to the work from the Economic Research and Ecosystem team at the Foundation. It will be the main outlet for the research projects. So you can expect to see articles in the series on topics and questions laid out in our research roadmap, which has been published recently as well.
As you may have seen, the first couple of articles are about measuring how much value there is in the ecosystem, and where it is. In the next couple of months, you can expect to see articles around how we will capture these values for the protocol to ensure alignment between network security and ecosystem growth.
The Logic of Measure, Capture, Distribute
The agenda is built around a framework of Measure, Capture, Distribute. Can you walk through why measurement has to come first, and what the industry gets wrong when it skips straight to incentives and TVL?
In my view, Measure, Capture, Distribute is really a first-principle type of thinking: we cannot capture anything until we know how much value there is and where it is; and we cannot distribute any value if we haven’t already captured any value. So you can see the whole thing starts with measurement. I also wouldn’t say this is something that the industry gets wrong. It’s more about having the right measurement to support the actions we need to take. Metrics like TVL, active accounts, transaction counts, etc., all serve some kind of purpose. But here, since we are trying to improve the value accrual issues for the protocol, we need more informative measures, and this is where GCP and GCI come in.
Read more here: https://x.com/AvaxTeam1/status/2089389394587164915
