The Avalanche Foundation Announces First Retro9000 Grantees
The Avalanche Foundation Announces First Retro9000 Grantees
Jun 10, 2025 / By Avalanche Foundation / 3 Minute Read
Meet the first wave of builders rewarded through Retro9000 for launching Avalanche (Layer 1s) L1s or developer tooling on mainnet.
As part of its continued commitment to empower the Avalanche community and the developers building it, the Avalanche Foundation is proud to announce the first round of Retro9000 grantees, selected from a competitive pool of builders innovating across the Avalanche ecosystem.
Retro9000 is a retroactive grant program backed by a $40 million pool, designed to reward projects that are already delivering impact. It’s built to recognize developers who have already shipped Avalanche L1s and foundational infrastructure on mainnet, driving Avalanche forward.
Avalanche9000 Testnet – Continuous Round
The first round of Retro9000 was tied to the Avalanche9000 Testnet, an ongoing campaign designed to encourage experimentation, deployment, and iteration of Avalanche L1s and developer tooling from testnet to mainnet.
Projects qualified by participating in the testnet and:
Launching a permissioned or permissionless Avalanche L1, or
Building developer tooling and infrastructure that supports Avalanche L1s
Participants climbed the leaderboard by sharing progress updates and collecting community votes — with visibility and engagement helping shape their eligibility for retroactive funding. This format allowed builders to focus on shipping while the community and committee evaluated their impact over time.
Snapshot Complete
The first program snapshot was completed on March 17, 2025, marking a key milestone in the Retro9000 journey.
To qualify, projects had to meet all of the following criteria:
Be marked as “Currently Live” on their Retro9000 mainnet page
Have received votes on the Retro9000 platform
Be building infrastructure, tooling, or applications for Avalanche L1s
Each submission was reviewed by the Retro9000 committee using a structured decision matrix that considered technical contributions, usage, alignment with Avalanche L1s, community vote performance, and overall potential for ecosystem impact.
Prior funding from initiatives like infraBUIDL(), infraBUIDL(AI), Blizzard, Codebase, Innovation House, or Ava Labs was also taken into account to ensure fair distribution and avoid redundant support. Projects that had already received significant backing may have received smaller grants or been deprioritized to expand reach across the ecosystem.
Introducing the First Batch of Grantees
We are pleased to announce the inaugural cohort of 19 Retro9000 grantees, collectively awarded over $1 million in retroactive funding.
These projects have been recognized for shipping impactful Avalanche L1s and infrastructure tooling already live on mainnet:
L1Beat, Suzaku, Tesseract, Snowpeer, COQnet, FCHAIN, KALICHAIN, PLYR L1, NodΞRunr, Avalanche for Humans, Ami, CodeNekt, Cedomis, Koroshi, Hatchyverse, Memoria, Animalia, Sherry, and Inverter Network.
Grant distributions are subject to the completion of KYB & KYC.
Each project has been contacted by the Avalanche Foundation to coordinate next steps.
Upcoming Snapshot
If your project wasn’t selected in this snapshot, don’t worry — Retro9000 is an ongoing program with recurring quarterly snapshots. The next one takes place on Tuesday, July 15, 2025 at 12:00 UTC.
Build publicly, get voted on by the community, ship to mainnet, and get rewarded.
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.
