The Avalanche Foundation announced Tuesday a major push to woo top projects with a cache of 4 million AVAX tokens (worth $290 million at today’s prices).

Specifically, the effort looks to foster smart-contract blockchain Avalanche’s “subnet” functionality, where application-specific blockchains – be they for Web 3 gaming or decentralized finance (DeFi) – can be spun up at scale.

Early targets of the so-called “Multiverse” initiative include DeFi Kingdoms, a popular game that ported over to Avalanche in December. The effort will create a new Avalanche-native token, CRYSTAL, meant to complement the game’s existing JEWEL token, according to Tuesday’s press release.

Other members of the project’s first cohort include Aave, Golden Tree Asset Management, Wintermute, Jump Crypto, Valkyrie and Securitize.

The new injection of funding speaks to the continued race among newer base layers competing for the smart-contract mindshare that Ethereum has long commanded.

Identity and compliance measures baked into certain subnets could be a boon for institutional DeFi, Aave founder Stani Kulechov said in a statement.

“This is a significant leap toward a future where the barriers between traditional and decentralized finance cease to exist,” he said.

From a technical perspective, projects utilizing their own “subnet” blockchains will eliminate competition for pooled resources, which has become an issue on Ethereum for events like popular non-fungible token (NFT) drops.

Other blockchains touting similar technologies are Polkadot (with its “parachains”) and Cosmos (with its “zones”).

UPDATE (March 8, 16:22 UTC): Adds Kulechov statement and more information.