Avalanche Deploys Helicon Upgrade to Boost Network Performance

Avalanche activated the Helicon upgrade on its mainnet on September 22, 2026, at 11 a.m. ET via AvalancheGo v1.15.0. The update introduces Continuous Execution (ACP-194) to decouple consensus from transaction execution, effectively doubling per-block capacity. Additionally, ACP-283 implements a dynamic gas pricing model, and the upgrade reduces the minimum staking duration for validators from 14 days to 48 hours while introducing auto-renewing staking and a 90% uptime requirement for rewards.