TechFlow News — Avalanche announced the successful activation of its Banff upgrade on mainnet, enabling subnet validators to stake and earn rewards in subnet-specific tokens. The upgrade also allows subnet creators to remove validators from their subnets before the staking period ends. These changes will not apply automatically to all subnets; to operate this way, subnet creators must convert their subnets into elastic subnets. Additionally, the Banff upgrade is a hard fork, meaning validators must upgrade to the latest version or risk being marked offline and seeing reduced rewards.
Patrick O'Grady, Head of Engineering at Ava Labs, stated that elastic subnets represent Avalanche's largest feature since the network's 2020 launch. By converting their subnets into elastic subnets, creators open up staking to anyone holding their subnet's token and directly reward them, enhancing security. However, validators are still required to stake AVAX tokens—a requirement necessary for the upcoming native inter-subnet messaging functionality.Original link
