Article republished from: Techub News
Author: Yangz, Techub News
On the evening of December 12, Avalanche announced the completion of a $250 million financing through locked token sales, led by Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly, and ParaFi Capital, with over 40 investment firms participating, including SkyBridge, SCB Limited, Hivemind, Big Brain Holdings, Hypersphere, Lvna Capital, Republic Capital, Morgan Creek Digital, FinTech Collective, CMCC Global, Superscrypt, Cadenza, Chorus One, and Tané Labs, with the funds raised to promote the upgrade called 'Avalanche9000'.
To be honest, I had not previously understood Avalanche9000. Compared to the strong momentum of Memecoins, the progress of many established public chains has been overlooked in this bull market. As early as the beginning of September, Avalanche announced the launch of the Avalanche9000 upgrade (or Etna upgrade), considering it the 'largest upgrade' since its launch. In simple terms, Avalanche hopes to change its original scaling form 'subnet' through Avalanche9000 and build it into Avalanche L1. According to Avalanche, Avalanche9000 will retain the advantages of rapid finality and high throughput of subnets while allowing new Avalanche L1 to customize staking, gas tokens, governance, etc. But specifically, how will this upgrade be implemented?
As one of the initial 'Ethereum killers', Avalanche embarked on the 'subnet journey' in 2022, allowing various applications to create their own application chains. However, to become a subnet validator, one must validate the Avalanche main network (Primary Network), which includes the contract chain (C-Chain), platform chain (P-Chain), and transaction chain (X-Chain). This means validators must allocate at least 8 AWS vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, and 1 TB of storage for network validation, in addition to a minimum stake of 2000 AVAX.
Initially, this requirement may not seem too high, but with the appreciation of AVAX (the price of AVAX was around $52 at the time of writing), overall operating costs will become increasingly high (the minimum staking requirement can be lowered, but frequent changes may not be Avalanche's consideration). In the long term, such a high entry threshold will impact the adoption of the Avalanche ecosystem.
Therefore, the Avalanche Foundation initiated proposal ACP-77 in April, aiming to fundamentally reform the creation and management of subnets, giving subnet creators greater flexibility.
According to this proposal, Avalanche L1 validators will no longer need to validate the main network simultaneously. They only need to sync with the P-Chain, which tracks changes in its own set of Avalanche L1 validators and handles cross-L1 communication through AWM. Furthermore, Avalanche L1 can decide and implement its own validation rules and staking requirements, and the P-Chain will no longer support staking reward distribution for Avalanche L1. In other words, the sovereignty of Avalanche L1 has returned from the P-Chain to L1 itself.
On the other hand, the proposal plans to change the P-Chain's fee mechanism from a fixed fee per transaction to a dynamic fee that better aligns with user payment principles, thereby ensuring Avalanche's long-term economic sustainability after removing the 2000 AVAX staking requirement. Specifically, this dynamic fee mechanism relates to several factors, including the total number of Avalanche L1 validators registered on the P-Chain. Fees will be adjusted based on network usage; when the total number of Avalanche L1 validators exceeds the target usage rate, fees will increase, and vice versa.
In addition to the proposals in ACP-77, the other foundational implementations of Avalanche9000 include two major interoperability protocols: Inter-Chain Token Transfer (ICTT) and Inter-Chain Messaging (ICM).
ICTT is a set of intelligent contracts based on the cross-chain communication protocols Teleporter and Avalanche Warp Messaging technology, deployed across multiple subnets, allowing users to transfer tokens between subnets. Each token transfer consists of a 'home' contract and at least one (and possibly multiple) 'remote' contracts. The 'home' contract is located in the subnet where the assets to be transferred reside, while the 'remote' contracts exist in other subnets.
ICM aims to achieve seamless communication between the C-Chain and new and existing Avalanche L1s. As long as a new L1 is deployed through Avalanche, it will be immediately supported and can interact with other L1s at any time. Through ICM, developers only need to call the sendCrossChainMessage on the TeleporterMessenger contract to send information from one Avalanche L1 to another. (Note: Currently, the GitHub technical documentation related to ICM has not been published; interested individuals can refer to relevant courses at Avalanche Academy.)
From September 3 until now, only a little over three months have passed, but the progress of Avalanche9000 has not been slow. In the month of the official announcement, the Avalanche Foundation announced two incentive programs, namely Bounty9000 with a maximum reward of $9,000 and a retrospective incentive program Retro9000 of $40 million, aimed at rewarding developers who develop L1 and related tools on Avalanche. On November 26, the Avalanche9000 upgrade went live on the Fuji testnet, with the latest expected launch time on the mainnet being December 16.
Avalanche states that the Avalanche9000 upgrade will reduce the deployment costs of Avalanche L1 by 99.9% and lower the transaction costs on the existing C-Chain by 25 times. Currently, more than 500 L1s are under development, involving areas such as tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), loyalty and rewards, gaming, payments, and institutional projects.
Avalanche9000 will undoubtedly make a significant mark on Avalanche's expansion path. However, given the current market sentiment that tends to chase high-risk assets without clear technical foundations, can such technological advancements bring Avalanche back into the investors' sight? In fact, not only Avalanche, but also NEAR's layout in AI, Polkadot's 2.0 plan, and the TradFi wave on Aptos, have all been drowned in the tide of Memecoins. The 'instant explosion' property of Memecoins has its market logic, while various technological advancements often require a longer time to settle and validate.
