Retro9000, a $40M Grant Program, Rewards Developers Building Avalanche L1s

In an ongoing effort to empower developers building on Avalanche, Retro9000, an up to $40 million retroactive grant program was announced today as part of Avalanche9000, the largest upgrade to the Avalanche ecosystem. Funded by The Avalanche Foundation, with the goal of rewarding developers for testing and launching foundational ecosystem building blocks on Avalanche, Retro9000 empowers developers to do what they do best–innovate and build.

While the current blockchain landscape offers countless opportunities, it comes with technical roadblocks, creating economic and logistical limitations that make building and deploying projects challenging.

“Avalanche9000 is the culmination of years of development work to build a platform that can support fast, scalable and connected L1s,” said Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo, Chief Operating Officer at Ava Labs. “Leveraging this moment, the Retro9000 incentivized testnet program attempts to bootstrap an L1 ecosystem and provide the earliest and most engaging developers incentives to build their product.”

Retro9000 will specifically reward developers building L1 blockchains and related, critical developer tooling on the Avalanche9000 testnet. Submissions are ranked on a public leaderboard, driven by community votes informing retroactive grant allocations. Retro9000 encourages developers to build publicly, earn community support, and test and ship projects to get rewarded.

Avalanche9000 will significantly lower the economic barrier to deploy an L1 blockchain, allowing businesses to get to market faster while creating a safe layer for builders of all sizes to experiment. The Avalanche9000 moment includes technical Etna Upgrade, ACP-77, updated network nomenclature, additional developer incentives, tooling, community incentives, and the Core browser hub. Developers can also benefit from Avalanche Layer 1 blockchains that communicate with each other via Interchain Messaging (ICM), sharing in collective interoperability to build network effects.

“The forthcoming upgrade will remove the requirement to validate the Primary Network, massively reducing the cost of deploying and maintaining an L1 blockchain in the Avalanche Network,” said Martin Eckardt, Director of Developer Relations at Ava Labs. “L1 validators will no longer have to stake high amounts of AVAX for entry, giving thousands of projects access to a custom, interoperable blockchain built on a battle-tested tech stack at a low cost.”

Full details on Retro9000 guidelines and to see who is eligible please visit avax.network/retro9000.

Keep tabs on the latest with Retro9000 and learn more about The Avalanche9000 enhancement in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from October 16 to 18, 2024 at Avalanche Summit LATAM.

About Avalanche Blockchain Network

Avalanche is a high-performance blockchain platform designed for builders who need to scale. Engineered with a revolutionary three-part Layer 1 (L1) architecture, Avalanche is anchored by its Avalanche Consensus Mechanism, ensuring near-instant finality for transactions. The platform also features an open-source Layer 0 (L0) framework, enabling the seamless creation of interoperable Layer 1 blockchains with high throughput on both public and private networks.

Supported by a global community of developers and validators, Avalanche offers a fast, low-cost environment for building the next generation of decentralized applications (dApps). With its unique blend of speed, flexibility, and scalability, Avalanche is the preferred choice for innovators pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology.

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About the Avalanche Foundation

The Avalanche Foundation is a non-profit entity that fosters the advancement and growth of the Avalanche platform for the world. The Foundation offers development programs for developers, entrepreneurs, and users to help turbocharge the advancement of the Avalanche ecosystem.

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