What Is BENQI (QI)? The Avalanche DeFi Token That More Than Doubled on 25 September

BENQI (QI) is the native token of BENQI, a liquid staking and lending protocol on Avalanche, and on 25 September 2026 it closed 139.28% higher on CoinMarketCap's daily series. The token has traded since August 2021. That one bar, printed on 110 times the previous day's volume, is what sent people searching for BENQI crypto.

QI climbed from a $0.00150746 close on 24 September to $0.00360703, after touching $0.0050025, its highest price since 2 November 2025. Volume reached $94.49 million against $861,892 the day before. By the 29 September close of $0.00329699, QI still stood 118.7% above its 24 September close, while daily volume had shrunk 91% from the spike.

What Is BENQI (QI)?

BENQI runs four DeFi products on Avalanche, the network our guide to Avalanche and why AVAX is a US digital commodity covers. Liquid staking and lending carry most of the money, while Ignite and Node Voting deal with the validators that secure the chain.

QI is the protocol's own token on the Avalanche C-Chain. Holders stake it to earn BENQI Miles, the voting power behind Node Voting, and paying Ignite fees in QI takes 5% off. BENQI's Benqinomics overview says the founding team governs the protocol until a DAO of QI holders takes over.

Why Is BENQI Trending?

BENQI is trending because of one trading day. CoinGecko's daily points put the 25 September gain at 137.3% against CoinMarketCap's 139.28%, and this page uses CoinMarketCap's figures throughout.

The move started early. CoinMarketCap's hourly bars show QI jumping from about $0.00165 to a high of $0.00317 in the 01:00 UTC hour. It then climbed in steps to the $0.0050025 top in the 11:00 UTC hour and closed the day 27.9% below it.

Volume did the loudest talking. The $94.49 million traded on 25 September was 110 times the 24 September figure and 107 times QI's $881,768 average over the 30 days before it. The next busiest day of 2026 was 27 September at $26.54 million, two days after the spike.

No announcement explains the jump. BENQI's Telegram announcements channel posted once on 25 September at 15:26 UTC, hours after the top, and the post explained how the sAVAX exchange rate works. Avalanche's own coin rose 4.39% that day on Phemex's AVAX perpetual, so QI moved on something of its own, and this page gives the move no cause.

The next four days tested it. QI fell 17.8% on 26 September and closed at $0.00285055 on 27 September, 21.0% below the spike close. Two up days followed, and 29 September closed 4.06% higher. That left QI 8.6% under its 25 September close and 34.1% under the intraday top, on $8.31 million of volume.

How Does BENQI Work?

BENQI Liquid Staking and sAVAX

BENQI liquid staking takes AVAX on the C-Chain and hands back sAVAX, a token that keeps earning Avalanche staking rewards while you use it elsewhere in DeFi. The liquid staking overview says the sAVAX balance never grows, but its value in AVAX does. Unstaking through BENQI takes 15 days. BENQI charges no staking fee and keeps 10% of the rewards its validators earn.

It's the idea behind Lido's stETH on Ethereum, which our explainer on what stETH is and how Lido's liquid staking works walks through. At 13:03 UTC on 30 September the sAVAX contract held 23.33 million AVAX, about $267 million at the 29 September close of Phemex's AVAX perpetual, 11.434.

BENQI Markets

BENQI Markets let you deposit assets to earn interest and borrow against them. Core Markets hold liquid assets such as AVAX and USDC and let a borrower take any listed asset. The isolated Avalanche Ecosystem Markets take long-tail tokens and real-world assets as collateral but lend only USDC against them. Our guide on what crypto lending is covers the pooled model underneath.

QI's own market is the exception. The docs describe QI as collateral, yet a read of BENQI's lending controller at 13:13 UTC on 30 September found QI deposits and QI borrowing both paused. The same read showed a collateral factor of zero, so QI can't back a loan on BENQI.

Ignite and Node Voting

Ignite rents out validators. An Avalanche validator needs 2,000 AVAX staked, and Ignite's pay-as-you-go option lets you run one from 8 AVAX a week while BENQI supplies the stake.

Node Voting is where QI does most of its work. Staking QI earns BENQI Miles, which build up to a cap of 100 Miles per staked QI. Unstaking any amount resets the whole balance to zero, and the docs' own example of 1,000 QI earning about 336 Miles a day puts that cap about 298 days away. Miles holders vote for validators, and their votes steer 35% of the AVAX that BENQI delegates, with the rest going to an open pool.

BENQI Tokenomics

The BENQI token has a fixed supply of 7.2 billion QI. A read at Avalanche block 96,457,008 (12:57 UTC on 30 September) returned exactly that total. The contract's code holds no function to mint or burn QI and no owner or pause switch, and it isn't an upgradeable proxy, so the number can't change. CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko count all 7.2 billion as circulating, which put QI's market value at $23.74 million at the 29 September close.

QI copies the vote-delegation design of COMP, the token of the lending protocol our guide on what Compound Finance is and how it works explains. The allocation below comes from BENQI's token distribution page.

Every line in the docs' table reads "Fully unlocked". Even read at its slowest, the core contributors' schedule (an August 2022 start, a one-year cliff and three years of quarterly vesting) ran out by August 2026. So the 25 September spike carried no unlock and no change in float.

At the same block the ten largest addresses held 69.32% of all QI. The biggest, with 17.30%, is a multisig wallet that needs three of its ten signers to move funds. The second is a three-of-six multisig holding exactly 1,080,000,001 QI, the size of the Foundation allocation plus one token, though the chain doesn't say who controls it. The fifth is the veQI contract on BENQI's liquid staking contracts page, holding 5.97% of supply for users staking for Miles.

Which QI Contract Is the Real One?

The real QI lives at 0x8729438EB15e2C8B576fCc6AeCdA6A148776C0F5 on the Avalanche C-Chain, the only QI address on BENQI's contracts page. A DexScreener search at 13:06 UTC on 30 September returned two other tokens called BENQI with the ticker QI. One uses the same address on BNB Chain but is a different contract with 27.26 million tokens in total. The other is on Solana, and its pool opened at 01:18 UTC on 26 September, the day after the spike. That pool advertised $3.68 million of liquidity, of which $8,208 was USDC and the rest was 995.8 million of the copy's own tokens.

Qi Dao is a separate project that also trades as QI. BenQ the electronics brand has nothing to do with either.

How to Buy BENQI (QI) Safely

Phemex lists no QI market. Its product list read on 30 September 2026 shows the QI/USDT spot pair as delisted and no QI perpetual, so a Phemex account can't buy BENQI QI.

Anyone buying elsewhere should check the contract first, character for character, against the Avalanche address above. The pool should be old, like the two largest QI/WAVAX pools on Avalanche that opened on 19 August 2021, and the order has to fit its depth.

Depth is the tight part. DexScreener counted about $507,000 of liquidity across QI's Avalanche pools at 12:58 UTC on 30 September, with $242,950 in the largest. A read of that pool at 13:09 UTC found 40.11 million QI against 10,717 WAVAX. A $10,000 buy into that pool alone would pay on average about 8% above the starting price before fees, valuing AVAX at the Phemex perpetual's 29 September close.

What Are the Risks of BENQI?

Two Multisigs Hold 32.3% of QI

The two largest wallets hold 32.3% of the supply between them. The three-of-six multisig's 1.08 billion QI came to about $3.56 million at the 29 September close, roughly seven times the liquidity in QI's Avalanche pools on the 30 September read. A sale from either wallet on chain would swamp those pools.

Team Control and Upgradeable Contracts

BENQI's risks page says a multisig framework can change collateral factors and staking rules, and the docs' parameters page names the BENQI Core Team as the one adjusting them. The risks page also says the lending and liquid staking contracts are upgradeable, that emergency functions can pause markets or sAVAX redemptions, and that audits don't cover a compromised signer.

Liquidation Risk for BENQI Borrowers

The controller read showed BENQI lending up to 74% of the value of deposited AVAX and 70% of sAVAX. The docs' health page says a loan drawn to that line gets liquidated on any further fall, and Phemex's AVAX perpetual dropped 9.37% on 23 September alone. Our guide on how liquidation engines work lays out the same mechanics from the trading side.

The MPC Network Behind sAVAX

Staked AVAX crosses to Avalanche's P-Chain through an off-chain multi-party computation network. The risks page warns that an attacker who breached enough of its nodes could misdirect staked assets, and that a large outage would halt staking.

Is BENQI a Good Investment?

The spike didn't change what QI is. It's a fixed-supply token with every allocation already out and a vote on where 35% of BENQI's AVAX delegations go. None of the four Benqinomics pages in BENQI's docs gives QI holders a share of the 10% staking cut or any buyback, and that gap is the token's weak point.

For QI to keep its gains, people have to want Miles. Staking for Miles is the one use that takes QI off the market for months at a time, and BENQI's own lending market has shut QI out. The protocol is big next to its token, with the sAVAX pool alone holding about 11 times QI's $23.74 million market value on the 30 September read.

On price, QI's 29 September close was 10.1% above its $0.00299588 close of 31 December 2025. It's 3.14 times its lowest close of the year, $0.00105106 on 24 July, and about 99.2% below the $0.39417 record CoinGecko logged on 23 August 2021.

It suits someone who wants a say in Avalanche delegations or runs a validator that wants BENQI's stake. It doesn't suit a trader who needs to leave a large position in one order.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is BENQI legit?

BENQI's risks page lists audits that include Halborn's review of the lending market in May 2021 and Cyfrin's review of Ignite in December 2024. The same page tells users not to supply their life savings to the protocol.

What is one sAVAX worth in AVAX?

At 13:03 UTC on 30 September the sAVAX contract valued one sAVAX at 1.2876 AVAX. The rate climbs as staking rewards arrive, and the contract's settings give unstaking a 15-day cooldown and a 2-day redemption window.

What is the QI price?

QI closed 29 September 2026 at $0.00329699 on CoinMarketCap, the last settled close this page uses. CoinGecko records QI's all-time low as $0.00100721 on 25 July 2026, two months before the spike.

Did Phemex ever list QI?

Yes. Phemex opened a QI/USDT spot pair on 14 April 2022, and the product list read on 30 September 2026 shows that pair delisted with no QI perpetual.

Final Thoughts

QI's price held most of its 25 September gain while its volume walked away, and the chart can't say which crowd stayed. The veQI contract can, because staking for Miles ties QI up for the months it takes to build voting power. A bigger balance there on the next read would mean the spike found holders, and a flat one would mean it found traders.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.