Anticipated Avalanche9000 upgrade goes live, reducing costs and making it easier to launch Avalanche subnets

Avalanche, the application-friendly Layer 1 blockchain, published its much-anticipated Avalanche9000 upgrade on Monday, according to an announcement. The upgrade introduces a number of new features, including improvements that make it easier to launch “subnet” blockchains and cheaper to run smart contracts. 

“This is the start of hundreds of Avalanche L1s launching,” the team wrote on X. “Avalanche9000 reduces the cost to deploy an L1 by 99.9%, and with hundreds of L1s being developed on testnet, look out for an explosion of launches in the coming months.”

The team explained in a blog post that Avalanche9000 is the network’s largest upgrade to date. The update features improvement proposals ACP-77, which changes how validators operate, and ACP-125, which lowers the base fee on Avalanche’s main “C-chain” network. 

In particular, validators will no longer be required to validate the main chain when validating specific subnets, thereby reducing operational costs and hardware requirements. For context, in the previous model, Avalanche validators needed to stake at least 2000 AVAX tokens (roughly $100,000) to validate the primary network.

Allowing chains to have dedicated validator sets and run independently from the primary network “greatly reduces the upfront cost to bootstrap a project, and also allows different regulation and jurisdiction requirements to be met,” the team wrote. This part of the 9000 upgrade is called the “Etna” upgrade. 

An Avalanche subnet is a group of nodes that work together to validate transactions on one or more sovereign blockchains. Like other “blockchain-as-a-service” tooling, subnets can be customized to cater to specific use cases and define their own tokenomics. 

Additionally, Avalanche Community Proposal 125 will reduce the base fee on Avalanche's C-chain, the main smart contract chain, from 25 nAVAX to 1 nAVAX (worth about ($0.00000004). 

“The current minimum base fee of 25 nAVAX is higher than what the market demands, leading to artificially reduced network usage,” according to the proposal on GitHub . By lowering the minimum base fee to 1 nAVAX, we allow the market to dictate the appropriate fee levels, resulting in a more efficient allocation of resources and potentially higher network usage.”

Avalanche is a multi-chain network of three separate blockchains designed for specific operations. The Exchange Chain, or X-chain, manages the creation and trading of digital assets, while the Platform Chain coordinates validators and subnets and the Contract Chain executes smart contracts.

Avalanche, which claims to support over 500 Layer 1 blockchains, launched an Avalanche9000 testnet in November with over $40 million in retroactive rewards for developers building on the network. Last week, the Avalanche Foundation raised $250 million in a locked token sale led by Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly and ParaFi Capital to support the upgrade’s rollout. 

AVAX, the 11th largest token by market capitalization, is trading down slightly on the day, according to The Block’s Avalance price page .