BENQI🔺 (@BenqiFinance): The Avalanche Summit NYC - Building the Financial Rails for the On-chain Economy

The Avalanche Summit NYC - Building the Financial Rails for the On-chain Economy Welcome to Freshman Questions, a BENQI educational series designed to make Avalanche and decentralized finance easier to understand for new users. 🔺 Avalanche Summit New York is happening September 16–17. And a quick look at the agenda reveals something important. Just a short distance from Wall Street, Avalanche is bringing together institutions, builders, investors, policymakers and crypto-native teams to discuss what happens as more of the global economy moves onchain. The Summit’s focus reflects how far the conversation around blockchain has evolved. Avalanche describes the event around two major themes: onchain finance and consumer applications, with discussions spanning tokenized assets, blockchain-native liquidity, regulated capital markets, institutional adoption and the infrastructure required to turn those ideas into working products. For BENQI, these conversations are particularly relevant. BENQI was built around this idea: if Avalanche is going to become infrastructure for an onchain economy, users and institutions need financial infrastructure around $_AVAX itself. That means making capital productive. Kaking staking liquid. Making borrowing and lending accessible. Making validator infrastructure easier to operate. And increasingly, giving the community a role in how that infrastructure develops. This is where Avalanche's direction and BENQI's mission converge. First, What Is Avalanche Summit? Avalanche Summit brings together builders, investors, enterprises, and financial institutions working around the Avalanche ecosystem and the broader onchain economy. For a new BENQI user, the important part isn't simply that another crypto conference is taking place. It's what people are talking about there. This year's agenda includes conversations such as: Beyond Yield: The Institutional Case for Staking Built for Business: Why Avalanche, Why Now Follow the Flows: Where Institutional Capital Is Moving Thriving in an Uncertain World Alongside those are sessions addressing institutional onchain activity, tokenization, stablecoins, businesses building on Avalanche, and the development of onchain financial infrastructure. Put those topics together and a larger question emerges: What does finance look like when traditional finance and blockchain converge with more capital, assets, and businesses beginning to operate onchain? BENQI has been part of this story from day one. Avalanche is built for Business. BENQI is built for Avalanche. Avalanche is bringing finance onchain Representatives from firms including BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Apollo and other major financial and crypto institutions are attending the Summit, with tokenization positioned as one of the event's defining conversations. The agenda extends into stablecoins, payments, DeFi, regulation, AI and the infrastructure required to support increasingly sophisticated onchain markets. This isn't simply a conversation about putting assets on a blockchain. Once assets move onchain, they need markets. They need liquidity. They need collateral. They need lending infrastructure. And they need efficient ways for capital to move between opportunities. That is precisely the layer of Avalanche that BENQI has spent years building. BENQI Markets: liquidity for an expanding onchain economy BENQI Markets allows users to supply assets, earn interest and borrow against their holdings rather than having to sell them. BENQI Core Markets provide lending and borrowing infrastructure for highly liquid assets including $_AVAX and USDC. That architecture becomes increasingly relevant as the Avalanche ecosystem attracts and digitizes more tokenized assets. The Summit is putting tokenization, institutional finance and blockchain-native liquidity at the center of the discussion. BENQI provides infrastructure through which parts of that emerging asset universe can potentially become productive collateral and participate in onchain markets. In other words, Avalanche brings tokenized assets onchain. BENQI and DeFi protocols create additional markets around them. sAVAX: making the native asset productive The same principle applies to $_sAVAX itself. Native Avalanche staking contributes to network security and generates staking rewards, but traditionally requires $_AVAX to move to the P-Chain and become locked. BENQI Liquid Staking changes the capital-efficiency equation. Users can stake $_AVAX directly from the C-Chain and receive $_sAVAX, a liquid representation of their staked position. That $_sAVAX continues accruing staking rewards while remaining transferable and usable throughout DeFi. It can be supplied to lending markets, used as collateral, deposited into liquidity pools or integrated into other DeFi strategies. This creates a powerful flywheel: Stake $_AVAX → secure Avalanche → receive $_sAVAX → deploy $_sAVAX across DeFi → increase onchain liquidity and capital efficiency. As Avalanche attracts more users, applications and capital, making the network's native asset productive becomes increasingly important. BENQI Liquid Staking was built for exactly that. What Does Kevin O'Leary's "Thriving in an Uncertain World" Have to Do With BENQI? The Summit's Kevin O'Leary fireside introduces another useful perspective: How should investors think about uncertainty? Crypto doesn't eliminate uncertainty. Neither does DeFi. Markets remain volatile. Interest rates change. Asset prices move. Smart contracts introduce technical risks. Borrowing creates liquidation risk. Regulations evolve. But blockchain infrastructure can give investors additional tools for deciding how capital is deployed. An $_AVAX holder can choose whether to hold. Stake. Liquid stake. Supply liquidity. Lend. Borrow. Or maintain capital in stable assets. BENQI doesn't eliminate the risks involved in those choices. It provides infrastructure through which users can act on them. Productive capital is not the same thing as risk-free capital. And What Does Anchorage's Presence at the Summit Signal? Even something like Run Club presented by Anchorage becomes interesting in the context of a broader Summit conversation. Anchorage Digital represents part of the institutional infrastructure developing around digital assets. And its support for BENQI Staked AVAX provides a tangible connection between that institutional layer and BENQI's DeFi-native infrastructure. That is a small example of a much larger transition. Crypto-native protocols don't need to become traditional financial institutions at all. Instead, different layers can connect. BENQI can provide liquid staking infrastructure. Avalanche can provide the blockchain. Institutional custodians can provide institutional access. Other applications can provide lending, trading, tokenization, payments, or settlement. The resulting ecosystem becomes more interconnected. So What Should BENQI Users Actually Watch at Avalanche Summit? Don't just watch for announcements. Watch for connections. When speakers discuss institutional staking, ask what institutions will need to make staked assets liquid and usable. When they discuss institutional capital flows, ask where that capital can earn, borrow, or find liquidity once it arrives onchain. When they discuss tokenization, ask what financial markets those tokenized assets will need. When businesses explain why they're building on Avalanche, ask what financial infrastructure their users and assets may eventually require. When stablecoins are discussed, think about their role in lending, borrowing, settlement, and liquidity. Those questions lead back to something BENQI users already experience: Staking, liquidity, lending, borrowing, and infrastructure are becoming interconnected pieces of the same onchain economy. BENQI is helping make the capital inside that economy work. And as New York brings together the people building the next generation of onchain finance, that connection is becoming harder to miss. Avalanche provides the rails. BENQI puts the capital to work. Stay tuned for more information about the Summit. Got another Freshman Question you'd like us to cover? Let us know! 🔺