It’s Time: Scale with Subnets
Minimize your transaction costs, and maximize your user experience.
You have probably heard about the limitless promise of Web3 to overhaul everything from money to privacy, to sports, culture, and community. The truth is that those of us building Web3 know its promise, but also its limitations. Most notably, the capacity of a single blockchain to absorb global traffic as Web3 migrates from niche communities to mainstream adoption.
How can Web3 on-board the first billion people, when first generation blockchains are already buckling under periods of increased load from less than one million addresses? How can we talk about a future where people migrate all financial services on-chain, when a single project can bend and even break entire networks with billions of dollars locked in applications?
The answer is Avalanche Subnets.
Subnets are custom, application-specific blockchains in the Avalanche ecosystem. Subnets are connected to the core Avalanche blockchain, but don’t compete over a single pool of resources, enabling developers to fully customize and control their user experience. Everything from choosing which token pays for fees, to who validates network activity, to what virtual machine facilitates operations, are all configurable by Subnet developers.
Crucially, in addition to inheriting Avalanche’s security, speed, and community, Subnets isolate application activity away from the broader network, ensuring that high traffic spikes for one application don’t cause congestion for users across the entire network. This reduces network congestion, which further reduces transaction fees for everyone.
Avalanche Subnets are seeing rapid adoption across DeFi and gaming applications, as builders have a clear path to scaling their application for user demand today, while future-proofing their infrastructure to support mainstream adoption.
Institutions and enterprises are following suit, recognizing that having full customization enables complex and regulated use cases to be built on-chain in a secure and controlled environment. They determine who has access to and authority over Subnet activity, and can then provision applications to broader user groups on the public chain in later phases.
To review:
- Users win by having reliably fast and low-fee transactions for the applications they use, enabling them to focus on what they want to do, rather than how much transactions cost or how long transactions take.
- Developers win by scaling their applications in hours (rather than months or even years), differentiating on the experience they provide to users, and expanding the utility for applications’ governance tokens which can now be used for transaction fees on the Subnet.
What’s Next?
For Users:
Gaming
- DeFi Kingdoms is a cross-chain, play-to-earn MMORPG built on a strong DeFi protocol. The game features DEXs, liquidity pool opportunities, and a market of rare, utility-driven NFTs.
- Launched on March 30, 2022, the Crystalvale Subnet is the first expansion for the project. It is already executing more daily transactions than some Layer 1 blockchains, averaging about 250,000 per day just six weeks after launch.
- Crabada is a play and earn game native to Avalanche, that has rapidly grown into one of the largest games across Web3. Since launch just six months ago, Crabada has seen over $225M in NFT sales, eclipsing its older peers.
- Launched on May 9, 2022, Crabada’s Swimmer Subnet is already seeing 400,000+ transactions per day.
Looking to the quarters ahead, numerous top-tier DeFi and gaming projects are expected to launch as Avalanche Subnets, including Shrapnel, Ascenders, Domi Online Gunzilla, Castle Crush, and Ragnarok.
DeFi
Institutional DeFi Subnet (in-development):
- Ava Labs is collaborating with the Aave Companies, Golden Tree Asset Management, Wintermute, Jump Crypto, Valkyrie, Securitize and others to build the first horizontally-integrated blockchain specifically engineered for Institutional DeFi with native KYC functionality.
- Upon launch, regulated institutions will be able to leverage the power of Subnets to access DeFi primitives at scale and accelerate the institutional adoption of DeFi.
- Dexalot is delivering the traditional centralized exchange experience through a decentralized, on-chain application. Its aim is to enable users to trade crypto securely and efficiently, with no slippage or custody risk.
- Its Subnet is currently on Avalanche’s Fuji Testnet undergoing stress tests and development before launching on Avalanche Mainnet.
For Developers
Building successful Web3 applications is hard enough, and that’s without having to deal with the underlying blockchain infrastructure and extraneous variables like third-party projects causing your community to have to navigate a congested, high-fee chain to access your app.
Avalanche Subnets enable you to scale on-demand, overhauling your infrastructure for mass scale in the matter of hours, rather than days, weeks, months, or even years. In an ecosystem that moves as fast as Web3, every hour spent solving those challenges is an hour that could have been used to evolve the application that your community is passionate about.
There’s no barrier to getting started building with Avalanche Subnets now.
- Subnet Overview
- Subnet FAQ
- Subnet Documentation
- Tutorial: How to Create a Local Subnet
- Avalanche Explorer (Primary Platform + Subnets)
- Avalanche Developer Discord
As always, we’re here to help as you progress along your journey. Ava Labs and the Avalanche Foundation will be hosting hackathons, workshops, Twitter Spaces and more to support builders bringing Subnets to life. Information on upcoming events can be found by following the Avalanche Twitter or joining the Avalanche Events Telegram.
In March, the Avalanche Foundation launched Avalanche Multiverse, an incentive program focused on accelerating the adoption and growth of Subnets. Projects interested in participating in the program should complete the following form https://avalancheavax.typeform.com/to/AHipnhBh.
For general user support please visit support.avax.network to use our live chat or explore our knowledge base.
About Avalanche
Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality, and has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol. Avalanche is blazingly fast, low cost, and green. Any smart contract-enabled application can outperform its competition by deploying on Avalanche. Don’t believe it? Try Avalanche today.
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It’s Time: Scale with Subnets was originally published in Avalanche on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
