Nov 26, 2024
6thTrade
Avalanche has introduced the Avalanche9,000 testnet, a major upgrade designed to reduce costs and enhance accessibility for Layer 1 blockchain development. This initiative, spearheaded by the Avalanche Foundation, also comes with a generous financial incentive: $40 million in retroactive grants for developers, as well as an additional $2 million in referral bonuses to encourage wider adoption. The testnet officially went live today, with plans for full integration into Avalanche’s C-Chain mainnet in 2025.
Stephen Buttolph, Chief Protocol Architect at Ava Labs, emphasized that the aim of this upgrade is to make the entire Avalanche ecosystem more affordable. Among the key changes are lower C-Chain transaction fees and the removal of capital requirements for Layer 1 validators.
A central component of the Avalanche9,000 rollout is the Etna Upgrade, which introduces new rules for validators and rebrands Avalanche subnets as "Avalanche L1s." Two major updates under this umbrella—ACP-77 and ACP-125—are focused on cost reduction and improved interoperability.
ACP-77 will establish a new governance model for validators, aimed at supporting low-cost, natively interoperable blockchains, while ACP-125 will significantly reduce the base transaction fee on the C-Chain from 25 nAVAX to just 1 nAVAX.
While these fee reductions are modest on a per-transaction basis, they are expected to have a meaningful impact over time, making it more cost-effective for developers to build and maintain decentralized applications on the Avalanche network.
