Avalanche activates its Helicon upgrade

Avalanche activated its Helicon mainnet upgrade at 15:00 UTC. Nodes were required to run AvalancheGo 1.15.0 or another compatible release before the activation point.

Helicon introduces continuous execution and a dynamic minimum gas price, and changes several staking rules. The upgrade adds automatic stake renewal, shortens the minimum staking period and raises the validator uptime requirement to 90 percent.

Those changes alter both transaction processing and validator operations, so the upgrade is more than a routine client release. The activation applies the new rules on mainnet; it does not by itself establish how much throughput or fee behaviour will change under sustained demand.