Getting Started

Figure Out Your Needs​

The first step of planning your Avalanche L1 is determining your application's needs. What features do you need that the Avalanche C-Chain doesn't provide? Perhaps you want your own gas token or only want to allow access to KYCed customers. When to Build on an Avalanche L1 vs. on the C-Chain can help you make the decision.

Decide What Type of Avalanche L1 You Want​

Once you've decided to use an Avalanche L1, you need to decide what type of Avalanche L1 to build. This means choosing a virtual machine (VM) to create your Avalanche L1 with. Broadly speaking, there are three types of VMs to choose from:

EVM-Based Avalanche L1s​

EVM-based Avalanche L1s are forks of the Avalanche C-Chain. They support Solidity smart contracts and standard Ethereum APIs. Subnet-EVM is Ava Labs' implementation of an EVM-Based Avalanche L1.

Subnet-EVM is far and away the safest and most popular choice to build your blockchain with. It has the most mature developer tooling and receives regular updates by the Ava Labs team.

Experimental Avalanche L1s​

Experimental Avalanche L1s are proof-of-concept VMs developed by Ava Labs. They include the TimestampVM Go, TimestampVMRust, and others. These VMs are demo software and aren't ready for production environments. Although they do receive periodic updates, the Ava Labs team hasn't audited their performance and security, internally or externally. However, these open source projects are intended to inspire the community, and provide novel capabilities not available inside the EVM.

If you're looking to push the boundaries of what's possible with Avalanche L1s, this is a great place to get started.

Custom Avalanche L1s​

Custom Avalanche L1s are an open-ended interface that allow developers to build any VM they can dream. These VMs may be a fork of an existing VM such as Subnet-EVM, or even a non-Avalanche-native VM such as Solana's virtual machine. Alternatively, you can build your VM entirely from scratch using almost any programming language. See Introduction to VMs for advice on getting started.

Determine Tokenomics​

Avalanche L1s are powered by gas tokens. When you build an Avalanche L1, you have the option to decide what token you use and optionally, how you distribute it. You may use AVAX, an existing C-Chain token, or a brand new token. You'll need to decide how much of the supply you want to use to reward validators, what kind of emitting schedule you want, and how much to airdrop. Blocks may burn transaction fees or give them to validators as a block reward.

Decide how to Customize Your Avalanche L1​

After you've selected your VM, you may want to customize it. This may mean airdropping tokens to your team in the genesis, setting how gas fees rates on your network, or changing the behavior of your VM via precompiles. These customizations are hard to get right on paper and usually require some trial and error to determine correctly. See Customize Your EVM-Powered Avalanche L1 for instructions on configuring Subnet-EVM.

Learn Avalanche-CLI​

Now that you've specified your Avalanche L1 requirements, the next step is learning Avalanche-CLI.

Avalanche-CLI is the best tool for rapidly prototyping Avalanche L1s and deploying them to production. You can use it throughout the entire Avalanche L1 development lifecycle. To get started, take a look at Build Your First Avalanche L1.

Deploy Your Avalanche L1 Locally​

The first stage of Avalanche L1 development involves testing your Avalanche L1 on your local machine or on a private cloud server such as Amazon EC2. The goal of this phase is to lock-in your Avalanche L1 customizations and create your full-stack dapp without the constraints of deploying on a public network.

Development is extremely quick and updates take seconds to minutes to apply. In this phase, you should restrict dapp access to trusted parties. Because you're interacting with a local copy of the Avalanche network, you can't access production state or other production Avalanche L1s.

Deploy Your Avalanche L1 to Fuji​

The second stage of Avalanche L1 development involves deploying your Avalanche L1 and your dapp to the Fuji Testnet. This phase tests your ability to run validator nodes, coordinate all parties involved in the Avalanche L1, and monitor network health. You can also practice using Ledgers to manage Avalanche L1 transactions.

The Avalanche L1 is publicly visible and you may want to allow external users to test your dapp. Development on Fuji is significantly slower than with local development. Updates may now take hours to days to apply. It's important to do as much local testing as possible before moving to Fuji.

Deploy Your Avalanche L1 to Mainnet​

The final stage of Avalanche L1 development is creating your Avalanche L1 on Mainnet and deploying your dapp. It's time to let your real users in.

Once your Avalanche L1 is in production, you have little flexibility to change it. Some alterations are possible, but they require days to weeks to implement and roll out.

Your focus should shift to preserving network stability and upgrading your nodes as needed.

Start Developing Custom VMs​

If you've mastered Subnet-EVM and are looking for an additional challenge, consider building a custom VM. The Avalanche network supports far more than just the EVM. Current VMs only scratch the surface of what's possible.

Some ideas:

• Port an existing blockchain project to Avalanche. For example: Use Bitcoin's VM or Solana's VM.
• Create an app-specific VM instead of a general purpose VM. For example, create a DEX or a CLOB VM instead of something like the EVM.
• Create a more efficient implementation of the EVM.