With its Avalanche9000 upgrade prepping to hit mainnet, the Avalanche Foundation has announced Retro9000, which will distribute up to $40 million of tokens retrospectively to builders supporting Avalanche9000.

One of the key elements of Avalanche9000 (aka the Etna upgrade) is ACP-77, which will enable developers to spin up their own Avalanche-based L1s (previously called subnets) and create their own validation networks, which don’t have to validate the core Avalanche X, P and C-Chains.

Amongst other benefits, this will reduce the hardware resources and remove the 2,000 AVAX (currently worth $56,000) per validator staking requirements for launching an Avalanche-based L1.

Other updates in Etna include a dynamic fee system for the X and P-Chains, new random number generation, reduced C-Chain fees, and improvements to Avalanche’s EVM compatibility.

As for Retro9000, it’s hoped it will reward developers building these new Avalanche-based L1 blockchains and critical developer tooling on the Avalanche9000 testnet. Projects will be ranked on a public leaderboard that’s driven by community voting.

“Avalanche9000 is the culmination of years of development work to build a platform that can support fast, scalable and connected L1s,” said Ava Lab’s COO Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo.

“Leveraging this moment, the Retro9000 incentivised testnet program attempts to bootstrap an L1 ecosystem and provide the earliest and most engaging developers incentives to build their product.”

Find out more about the program at avax.network/retro9000.