BENQI

BENQI is a suite of decentralized finance protocols built on the Avalanche blockchain, organized around four core products. BENQI Liquid Staking lets users stake AVAX directly from the Avalanche C-Chain — without bridging to the P-Chain — and receive sAVAX, a yield-bearing liquid staking token that can be held, swapped, used as collateral or deployed in DEX pools and other DeFi applications. BENQI Markets is an over-collateralized lending and borrowing venue where depositors earn interest plus QI rewards and borrowers draw funds against supplied assets; it is split into Core Markets for highly liquid assets such as AVAX and USDC, and Avalanche Ecosystem Markets, isolated pools with specialized risk management that support long-tail crypto assets and tokenized real-world assets.

Ignite addresses the capital and technical requirements of running Avalanche validators and Subnets. It offers a Pay-As-You-Go option, under which a validator can be run for a weekly fee starting from 8 AVAX per week rather than locking 2,000 AVAX upfront, and a Stake option in which users stake QI and cover hosting fees to run automated validators and earn QI rewards. Node Voting is a governance mechanism through which holders of BENQI Miles direct how AVAX from the liquid staking pool is delegated: 35% of the pool is allocated according to community votes, while the remaining 65% is randomly distributed among validators meeting minimum criteria. Miles currently accrue gradually as users stake QI (the Flex Option), with a Lock Option granting instant accrual in exchange for a delayed exit described as planned but not yet implemented.

The protocol's code is open source, with deployed contracts published in a public GitHub organization covering lending, sAVAX, veQI, PGL staking and token sale modules, and contract addresses documented publicly.

Founding story

BENQI was founded by a group of early blockchain adopters and DeFi natives who argued that DeFi built on Avalanche's consensus protocol, with its high throughput and fast finality, could avoid the network congestion and high fees affecting Ethereum. JD Gagnon represented the team publicly at the time of its 2021 funding announcement.

Business model

BENQI operates permissionless on-chain protocols rather than intermediated services: users supply assets to lending markets and earn interest, borrow against collateral, stake AVAX for sAVAX, or pay fees to run validators through Ignite. The Ignite Pay-As-You-Go product charges a recurring weekly fee in AVAX, while the Stake option requires staking QI plus hosting fees. QI is the protocol's governance token, and BENQI Miles, accrued by staking QI, confer voting rights over validator delegation.

Sources describe fees and incentives at the protocol level — weekly validator fees and hosting fees under Ignite, interest paid by borrowers to depositors in BENQI Markets, and QI token rewards distributed to users — without disclosing corporate revenue.

Traction

The protocol reports being the leading Avalanche application by TVL and states that sAVAX is widely integrated across the Avalanche DeFi ecosystem. Its main smart contract repository has 30 stars and 27 forks on GitHub, with organization repositories updated into 2026.

Latest developments

Current product documentation covers four live product lines — Liquid Staking, Markets (core and Avalanche Ecosystem markets, including tokenized real-world assets), Ignite with Pay-As-You-Go and Stake options, and Node Voting — with the documentation last updated approximately four months before retrieval and GitHub repositories such as the avalanchego installer and Avalanche monitoring tooling updated in early 2026.