Avalanche Announces $40M Grant Program Ahead Of Avalanche9000 Upgrade

Avalanche is offering $40 million in grant funding to Layer 1 networks leveraging the upcoming testnet for its Avalanche 9000 upgrade.

On Sept. 26, the Avalanche Foundation unveiled Retro9000, a program allocating $40 million in retroactive funding to developers launching Layer 1 networks or technical tooling on the Avalanche9000 testnet.

Funding will be allocated through a community voting mechanism, with grant submissions published on a public leaderboard.

“Retro9000 encourages developers to build publicly, earn community support, and test and ship projects to get rewarded,” Avalanche said. “The Retro9000 incentivized testnet program attempts to bootstrap an L1 ecosystem and provide the earliest and most engaging developers incentives to build their product."

On Sept. 3, Ava Labs, the team behind Avalanche, said the Avalanche9000 testnet will launch “soon.”

Avalanche9000

Ava Labs recently described Avalanche9000 as the project’s largest upgrade since its mainnet launch four years ago.

Avalanche9000 will overhaul Avalanche’s existing subnet ecosystem into specialized Layer 1 networks, with the project hoping to foster DeFi, real-world asset, and gaming appchains.

Avalanche’s existing C-chain will continue to operate as Avalanche’s “primary chain,” serving as an “economic and foundation hub that powers the network” and facilitating the flow of liquidity between other Layer 1s in the ecosystem. Ava Labs said it will continue to develop and maintain the primary Avalanche C-chain following the launch of Avalanche9000.

Avalanche Layer 1s will be able to access the primary chain’s infrastructure and tools and will boast interoperability through Avalanche's Interchain Messaging protocol. Chains leveraging Avalanche9000 can design their own staking economics, select custom gas tokens, adopt various virtual machines, and access regulatory compliance and geoblocking restrictions.

The plan for Avalanche9000 comes as Optimism, Polygon, and ZKsync are similarly seeking to foster interoperable ecosystems of Layer 2 networks, and will further position Avalanche in competition with so-called Layer 0 protocols such as Cosmos and Polkadot.

Avalanche9000 will also eliminate the requirement that subnets provide a minimum stake of 2,000 AVAX ($56,300) and maintain the Avalanche C-chain or X-chain in addition to their own network, lowering the financial and hardware barriers for Layer 1s launching on Avalanche.

“The forthcoming upgrade will remove the requirement to validate the Primary Network, massively reducing the cost of deploying and maintaining an L1 blockchain in the Avalanche Network," said Martin Eckardt, the director of developer relations at Ava Labs. "L1 validators will no longer have to stake high amounts of AVAX for entry, giving thousands of projects access to a custom, interoperable blockchain built on a battle-tested tech stack at a low cost."

The Avalanche C-chain is currently the seventh-largest blockchain by total value locked in DeFi protocols with a TVL of $1.33 billion. The price of AVAX is up 1.5% over the past 24 hours, according to The Defiant’s crypto price feeds.