Avalanche has announced a new grant program that will reward developers building on the blockchain’s mainnet.

The Avalanche (AVAX) ecosystem will benefit from this new $40 million grant program through the ‘Retro9000’ initiative introduced by the Avalanche Foundation on Sept. 26.

A $40 million grant program

Retro9000 is a retroactive rewards program designed to incentivize developers to contribute to the blockchain platform’s ecosystem growth via layer-1 chains built and deployed on the Avalanche mainnet.

The program is part of ‘Avalanche9000’ upgrade, which is set to reduce the costs associated with layer-1 blockchain deployment and maintenance on the mainnet. A key feature of the upcoming upgrade is making it economically feasible for projects to launch within the growing subnets ecosystem.

“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,” Martin Eckardt, director of developer relations at Ava Labs.

Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo, chief operating officer at Ava Labs, stated that the grant is an initiative aimed at bootstrapping the layer-1 ecosystem of Avalanche. Retro9000 provides early developers with incentives that will drive the further growth of their products.

Retro9000 encourages developers to build their projects publicly, earning them community support. Projects can then test their products before launching to earn rewards.

Avalanche’s DeFi ecosystem

In recent months, the Avalanche DeFi community has benefited from the BOOST program. Among partners bringing these rewards to the community is DeFi protocol Aave (AAVE). Others are Benqi Finance, Delta Prime and GMX.

The Avalanche community is also set to benefit from the launch of SolvBTC to the network. SolvBTC is a yield-bearing Bitcoin (BTC) token also currently available on Ethereum(ETH) and other chains.

Solv Protocol’s SolvBTC integration brings the project’s decentralized Bitcoin reserves to Avalanche. Users within the ecosystem can now earn staking rewards on their Bitcoin holdings.