Avalanche activated Helicon on its Mainnet on September 22, 2026, at 11 AM ET through AvalancheGo v1.15.0, with the upgrade designed to make block verification up to 100 times faster. The release combines six Avalanche Community Proposals (ACPs), including changes to transaction processing, gas pricing and validator rewards. Its main feature, Continuous Execution under ACP-194, decouples consensus from execution so transactions can be processed asynchronously rather than in lockstep on the C-Chain. Post-launch data showed per-block capacity roughly doubled, providing the C-Chain with twice as much headroom, while early reports indicated the chain operated below its gas target for the first time in months. ACP-283 replaced the fixed minimum gas price with a validator-governed dynamic model, with observations pointing to an approximately 100-fold change in the effective gas fee floor. Helicon also reduced the minimum validator staking period from 336 hours, or 14 days, to 48 hours, or two days, and introduced auto-renewing staking. New staking periods require at least 90% uptime for validators to receive rewards. Mainnet node operators had to upgrade before activation, while certain legacy C-Chain RPC methods were discontinued. The upgrade was first activated on Avalanche's Fuji testnet on July 28, 2026, with no significant issues reported, giving developers and operators nearly two months to test it. For developers, the changes are intended to reduce congestion-related slowdowns during demand spikes; for validators, they reduce the capital lockup while increasing performance requirements. Infrastructure providers and applications using deprecated RPC methods face the most immediate operational friction after activation.