Helicon: what changes for stakers and L1s

Helicon activated on the Fuji testnet on 28 July 2026. It bundles six ACPs, and together they are the largest single change to Avalanche’s staking economics since genesis. Mainnet follows once Fuji runs clean; [mainnet date TBC].

The six ACPs

• ACP-194, Continuous Execution. Transactions on the C-Chain are executed in a stream rather than block by block, which is also why the fee model below had to change first.
• ACP-236, Auto-renewed staking. Stakes no longer end at a fixed time; they roll over, with optional compounding.
• ACP-267, Uptime requirement 80% to 90%. A higher bar for reward eligibility.
• ACP-273, Minimum staking duration 336h to 48h. Two days instead of two weeks.
• ACP-283, Dynamic minimum gas price. Validators can raise the C-Chain floor to deter spam without touching normal-user costs.
• ACP-285, Minimum consumption rate 10% to 7.5%. With the maximum unchanged at 12%, the reward spread between a 48-hour stake and a long one widens to about 2.3 percentage points, on a 90-day rollout.

Why the short end matters

[Section to write: shorter minimum duration improves capital efficiency, the widened consumption-rate spread is what keeps average tenure from collapsing; the first-party framing is “from static constants to dynamic variables”.]

What to test on Fuji

[Section to write: run a node from the helicon-devnet-resources guide, test continuous staking through the CLI, check an L1’s fee configuration against ACP-224 before activation.]