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Developer Series

Avalanche9000 Guide

Avalanche9000 A Network of L1s

A New Paradigm for Development and Scalability on the Avalanche Blockchain

Security. Stability. Accessibility. Economics. These are the hallmarks of blockchain projects with higher ambitions than novelties in a vast technical industry.

Blockchain developers face the challenge of maintaining these factors in each project they build. However, the rising solutions in modern blockchain development have only partially addressed them. Disparate, modular apps and often inflexible blockchain layers can address specific issues but introduce many more, leaving builders with tools that still struggle to solve the challenges of independence and scalability needed to create the bleeding-edge of blockchain apps.

With Avalanche9000, Avalanche is getting a major upgrade—one that supports horizontal scalability and eliminates inflexible subnets, giving builders the tools they need to deploy robust L1 blockchains of their own.

Avalanche9000 radically rethinks how to extend blockchain infrastructure to empower developers to build faster. By leveraging the decentralized backbone of the Avalanche network, developers can do this without sacrificing their ability to scale or innovate.

Avalanche9000 is a massive technical upgrade for blockchain developers. Here’s what makes it unique.

L2 Chains, Avalanche Subnets, and Their Limitations

The current paradigm for building on Ethereum has been through L2s or more modular layers of data, execution, and consensus. By removing the overhead for validation, L2s offload work from the primary chain and create faster transactions and more potential for growth.

Unsurprisingly, L2s, especially on Ethereum, have become a go-to for developers who want to expand the functionality and composability of their applications. However, as many professionals and developers are discovering, L2s can promote community and liquidity fragmentation, where L2 chains don’t communicate and, through a gravitational pull, end up as more centralized enclaves with poor liquidity.

Then there are issues related to usage. While these L2 chains help mitigate performance and scalability issues, they also increase the system’s complexity. It becomes harder to properly secure these solutions or navigate the increasingly complicated dependencies between the L2 and the foundational L1 blockchain.

The result is a limited and ultimately flawed approach to addressing blockchain scalability, making it that much harder to ensure that a project is secure, composable, and fully takes advantage of blockchain technology’s inherent decentralized nature.

The current state of L1 creation on Avalanche has a few limitations that don’t necessarily make it easier for developers to take advantage of its infrastructure.

Until now, the foundation of scaling on Avalanche was the concept of subnets. Developers who wanted to build apps on the Avalanche blockchain would create these subnets that would essentially function as another blockchain through a process that would increase data throughput, improve performance, and provide more freedom for developers.

Over time, we identified some clear issues with this design approach:

Developers who wanted to build a subnet, had to attract a set of validators that would be required to validate the primary network, with a required 2,000 AVAX stake—a significant amount of funding for small and mid-size organizations and development houses.

While subnets would increase throughput, they also required syncing with the Avalanche chain as a validator. As this chain grows, the computing requirements for validation also grow, placing a performance tax on these subnets.

As subnets were previously tied to the primary network through shared validator sets, this created limitations for projects looking to deploy permissioned chains to comply with jurisdictional or geographical regulations.

To address these challenges, Avalanche9000 introduces a network of independent L1 blockchains, offering more autonomy, economic efficiency, and operational flexibility.

Horizontal Scaling and A Community of L1s

Under our previous paradigm of subnets, Avalanche was designed as a multi-lane highway that could support higher throughput by placing larger applications in their execution environments. The problem here was that subnets didn’t necessarily address core problems related to control or accessibility–especially regarding builders and their ability to create new applications with specific regulator requirements. Organizations couldn’t create a distinct blockchain that was fully in control of their tokenomics, data privacy, and security mandates.

The natural and widespread solution that other projects adopt at this point is a layered approach of L2s, L3s, etc., each building on top of the primary L1 functionality to enhance scalability and usage.

As we’ve found, this approach comes with its own set of tradeoffs. Layered solutions tend to fragment the community into centralized enclaves and ecosystems that don’t work with one another, so much so that Blockworks suggests that L2 centralization threatens the “foundational principles of blockchain.” While L2s enhance scalability to some extent, they kick the can down the road rather than solve the underlying problem.

Instead of building up and out, Avalanche9000 empowers builders to harness the power of the Avalanche network to create their own L1 chain without some of the baggage of the original subnet architecture. That means full customization, full decentralization, and full control over the economics and functionality of your chain.

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The Avalanche9000 Ecosystem

The network of Avalanche L1s is made possible through a combination of unique functions:

  • The Primary Network: The primary Avalanche chain serves as the economic foundation of the Avalanche network, controlling smart contracts (C-Chain), managing network validators (P-Chain), and supporting asset exchange (X-Chain). Every new L1 can access the functionality of the C-Chain, and new builders can leverage the robust infrastructure and tooling from the start, increasing liquidity and reducing overhead to launch new projects.

  • The Network of L1s: Unlike subnets or L2s, these independent L1s give developers full control over what they build. Avalanche L1s control staking economics, gas tokens, permissions, compliance and security standards, and other features without sacrificing performance or scalability.

  • Avalanche Interchain Messaging (ICM): Every L1 is connected through ICM so that asset exchange across chains is fast and secure. The ICM locks assets on the source chain and mints the equivalent on the receiving chain while maintaining the integrity and decentralization of exchange.

Avalanche9000 and the Etna Upgrade

The driving force behind Avalanche9000 is the Etna upgrade, a series of network upgrades and optimizations that address the challenges previously discussed and will used in a new era of Avalanche L1s

The core changes after Etna are:

  • Switchover to L1s: All subnets are now sovereign L1s as the network adopts this new Avalanche9000 architecture.

  • Accessibility for Validators: Validators no longer have to synchronize with the primary network and stake the 2,000 AVAX previously required to spin up a new validator. Now, fees are calculated based on their L1 validators (at a reduced rate).

  • L1 Ownership: Validation is moved from the P-Chain to individual L1s, creating permissioned blockchains that can include different compliance controls, such as KYC controls.

Individual Community Proposals in the Etna Upgrade:

  • ACP-77: Separates primary network validators from subnet validators, allowing L1s to set up validation management features via smart contracts. Now, individual L1s can have different rules for their local validators that can extend to the Avalanche system.

  • ACP-20: Adds Ed25519 TLS certificate security support for p2p communications on the Avalanche network.

  • ACP-103: Creates the dynamic fee mechanism for the primary chains (specifically the X-Chain and the P-Chain). Previously, these fees were static and did not represent changes to resource usage and network load.

  • ACP-113: Proposes a mechanism to create verifiable, non-cryptographic random number seeds. Avalanche currently doesn’t have a secure random number generator for EVM-compatible smart contracts, which limits their ability to be used for things like lotteries or security tasks.

  • ACP-118: ACP-118 is an Avalanche Community Proposal proposing a standard AppRequest payload format type, simplifying potential Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM) signature aggregation implementations.

  • ACP-125: Reduces the base fee on the C-Chain from 25 nAVAX to 1 nAVAX. nAVAX represents the lowest possible gas price needed to execute a transaction on the C-Chain.

  • ACP 131: Brings EVM opcodes from the Cancun Upgrade to the C-Chain and Subnet EVM.

Lowering the Barrier to Entry for Developers

One of the biggest challenges of building a blockchain project involves the underlying economics of the L1. This was as true for Avalanche, where starting projects became prohibitive for anyone but the most established developers.

Avalanche9000, from the ground up, is a solution to this barrier. With the drastic lowering of startup costs and the ease of launching fully independent yet connected L1 blockchains, rolling out a dedicated L1 project only takes minutes. Just register your validator on the P-Chain and pay a fee that will be burned.

Opening Space for Freedom and Decentralization

Under the previous subnet schema, developers faced some limitations that were tied directly to the necessary relationship between the subnet and the Avalanche chain.

With Avalanche9000, developers now have the freedom to launch chains that match their specific needs. That means:

  • There is potential to build private, permissioned chains distinct from the public, permissionless architecture of Avalanche to support a variety of regulatory compliance needs.

  • You can bring your own Virtual Machine to your L1, including the EVM, Ava-VM, WASM, and any other VM.

  • The ability to connect Avalanche L1s to oracle networks via Avalanche Interchain Messaging

The Retro9000 Incentive Program

In addition to these lowered fees, Avalanche is offering developers grant funding for being among the first to build their apps on Avalanche9000.

Retro9000 is a retroactive grant program funded by the Avalanche Foundation, designed to reward developers for pioneering testers and building the critical foundations of a network of Avalanche L1s.

This program offers up to $40 million in retroactive grants and rewards developers building the first generation of L1 apps and tools on the Avalanche9000 testnet.

Retro9000 is a new way to think of untapped possibilities. This retroactive rewards platform will launch with the initial track of 9000 testnet contributions. The earliest builders can participate and share their contributions publicly to show what’s possible on Avalanche.

The Promise of Secure, Scalable, Controllable Development with Avalanche9000

Avalanche9000 results from our initial vision of horizontal scalability on a blockchain. Instead of driving ourselves further and further into centralized L2s that don’t share tokenomics, resources, or even basic communication features, it’s possible to open up an L1 chain in a way that can empower developers to truly innovate.

The Avalanche9000 network of L1s is our first step down this road. With it, developers can gain the advantages of building on an L1 (security, customization, control) without sacrificing the benefits they’d expect from an L2 (scalability, speed, integration with foundational on-chain economics).