The cost of using Avalanche, a DeFi-focused smart-contract blockchain, has slumped since the implementation of the Avalanche9000 upgrade on Dec. 16, sending the number of transactions up by more than a third.

Since the upgrade, the proof-of-stake blockchain’s usage fees known as gas have averaged roughly 75% less than in the months beforehand, data from Flipside and Bitquery show. The number of transactions has increased by 38% to an average of 354,691 a day.

Avalanche, the world’s fifth-largest smart-contract blockchain by the market value of its native token AVAX, boasts of a multichain structure of C-Chain, which handles smart contracts, P-Chain for managing staking and validator coordination and X-Chain for processing asset transfers.

The upgrade comprised seven improvement proposals, including ACP-125, which lowered the base fee to run smart contracts on the C-Chain to 1 nAVAX from 25 nAVAX. One nAVAX is a billionth of an AVAX.

The upgrade also replaced the hefty validator fee of 2,000 AVAX with a monthly subscription of 1 to 10 AVAX, opening doors for projects of all sizes to introduce layer 1 (L1) protocols on Avalanche.

The goal of the upgrade was to make every component of the Avalanche tech stack cheaper by reducing C-Chain fees and removing capital requirements for L1 validators, Stephen Buttolph, Ava Labs’ chief protocol architect, told Decrypt in November.