Avalanche Unveils $40M Grant Program Ahead of ‘Avalanche9000’ Upgrade

The foundation supporting the Avalanche network is releasing a $40 million grant program to reward developers for building new protocols in the blockchain ecosystem.

The program, called Retro9000, is supposed to encourage developers to build on Avalanche ahead of a much-anticipated upgrade known as Avalanche9000, the Avalanche Foundation said Thursday in a press release.

“Normally, you ship a big upgrade to testnet, and if everything looks good, you immediately ship it to mainnet, and then you hopefully get adoption for it,” said Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo, chief operating officer at Ava Labs, the main developer firm behind Avalanche, in an interview with CoinDesk. “We kind of want to spin that on its head a little bit, and instead elongate the testnet process and do sort of what you can call an incentivized testnet.”

Builders and users will have to register with the Retro9000 platform to build on Avalanche, where the users receive some voting credits, based on their activity on the network.

“They’ll be able to effectively vote with those credits during the incentivized testnet on the builders, and this is going to be used as a signal for the Avalanche Foundation to then retroactively grant the participants afterwards,” D’Onorio DeMeo said.

“For a builder to actually qualify for the retroactive grant, they will have to eventually deploy on mainnet,” D’Onorio DeMeo said. “That is a prerequisite. The goal here is to allocate a substantial amount of funds, to build up a strong pipeline on testnet, so that when we go to mainnet, there’s a bunch of stuff to launch.”

Avalanche9000 is expected to be Avalanche’s largest upload since its mainnet launch in 2020. It’s supposed to make launching layer 1s on Avalanche cheaper, easier to customize and smoother to maintain.

The project’s native token, AVAX, is down about 29% this year – underperforming Ethereum’s ETH, which is up about 13%.

The date for Avalanche9000 has not been set, but the testnet will be launched in October, D’Onorio DeMeo told CoinDesk.

“Once the incentivized test net closes, we will hope that people will deploy their projects at mainnet and then reward them retroactively,” he said.

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