Author: Yangz, Techub News
On the evening of December 12, Avalanche announced the completion of a $250 million financing through a token lock-up sale, led by Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly, and ParaFi Capital, with participants 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 more than 40 investment firms. The raised funds will be used to promote an 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) and regarded it as the 'largest upgrade' since its launch. In simple terms, Avalanche hopes to change its original scaling model of 'subnets' through Avalanche9000 and build it into Avalanche L1. According to Avalanche, Avalanche9000 will retain the advantages of fast finality and high throughput of subnets while allowing new Avalanche L1 to customize staking, gas tokens, and governance. But specifically, how will this upgrade be implemented?
As one of the original 'Ethereum killers', Avalanche began its 'subnet journey' in 2022, allowing various applications to create their own application chains. However, to become a subnet validator, one must simultaneously validate the Avalanche primary network (Primary Network), including 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 space for network validation, and also require a minimum staking of 2000 AVAX.
Initially, this requirement may not seem too high, but as AVAX appreciates (around $52 at the time of writing), overall operational costs will become increasingly burdensome (minimum staking requirements can be lowered, but frequent changes may not be a consideration for Avalanche). In the long run, such a high barrier to entry will affect 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, providing subnet creators with greater flexibility.
According to this proposal, Avalanche L1 validators will no longer be required to validate the main network simultaneously. They only need to synchronize with the P-Chain, which tracks the changes in its own set of Avalanche L1 validators and processes inter-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 the distribution of staking rewards for Avalanche L1. In other words, the sovereignty of Avalanche L1 has returned from the P-Chain back to L1 itself.
On the other hand, this proposal plans to shift the P-Chain's fee mechanism from a fixed fee per transaction to a dynamic fee that is more aligned with user payment principles, ensuring the long-term economic sustainability of Avalanche after canceling the 2000 AVAX staking requirement. Specifically, this dynamic fee mechanism is related to several factors, including the total number of Avalanche L1 validators registered on the P-Chain. Fees will be adjusted based on network usage, increasing when the total number of Avalanche L1 validators exceeds the target utilization rate, 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 smart contracts based on the cross-chain communication protocol 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 (potentially multiple) 'remote' contracts. The 'home' contract resides in the subnet where the assets to be transferred are located, while the 'remote' contracts exist in other subnets.
ICM aims to achieve seamless communication between the C-Chain and new and existing Avalanche L1s. Once 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 messages from one Avalanche L1 to another. (Note: As of now, the technical documentation related to ICM on Github has not been published; interested individuals can refer to the relevant courses at Avalanche Academy.)
From September 3 to 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: Bounty9000 with rewards up to $9,000 and the $40 million retroactive incentive program Retro9000, aimed at rewarding developers who build L1 and related tools on Avalanche. On November 26, the Avalanche9000 upgrade went live on the Fuji testnet, and the latest expected launch time for the mainnet is December 16.
Avalanche stated that the Avalanche9000 upgrade will reduce the deployment costs of Avalanche L1 by 99.9% and decrease transaction costs on the existing C-Chain by 25 times. Currently, over 500 L1s are under development, covering areas including tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), loyalty and rewards, gaming, payments, and institutional projects.
Avalanche9000 will undoubtedly make a significant mark on Avalanche's path to expansion. However, in the current market climate, which tends to chase high-risk assets without a clear technological foundation, can such technological advancements bring Avalanche back into the sight of investors? 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 submerged in the flood 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.
