Author: Pedro, co-founder of Modular Media; Translation: Golden Finance 0xxz
AvailDA has announced its mainnet launch, and some of you may have even received some AVAIL airdrops. This post will serve as your guide to Avail, telling you everything you need to know, including what you can do with your AVAIL right now.
Before we delve deeper, it’s worth understanding more about why the launch of AvailDA is so important to the industry.
The blockchain space is developing at an incredible pace, and one of the most important advances we have seen recently is the rise of the Data Availability (DA) layer. Celestia is the first DA layer to go live, and its successful launch, along with its strong ecosystem and strong community support, has set a high bar. The launch of its TIA token, accompanied by a large number of staking and airdrop activities, has generated a huge sensation and demonstrated the potential of DA solutions in scaling and protecting modular blockchains.
Avail has emerged as another key player in the DA space. Avail was originally designed as part of Polygon in 2020 and only spun off as an independent entity in March 2023. Today, Avail is pioneering a “trinity” approach, focusing on AvailDA for rollup scalability, Nexus for rollup unification, and Fusion for shared security. For this article, we’ll focus only on AvailDA, a product that Avail just launched. We’ll explore the following:
Avail's Technical Foundation
AVAIL tokens, including how to obtain them, how to stake them, and more.
Avail's Rising Ecosystem
1. Understand AvailDA
Blockchains typically contain three core layers: the execution layer, the settlement layer, and the DA/consensus layer. AvailDA focuses exclusively on the DA/consensus layer, allowing other teams to deploy their own rollups (execution environments) on top of it - because Avail only worries about DA and consensus, it largely doesn't care what kind of virtual machine (EVM, BVM, or other) developers use, allowing for great flexibility.
AvailDA has three modes:
Validium mode: L3 can use Avail instead of the commonly used Data Availability Committee.
Rollup mode: (whether sovereign rollup or application-specific rollup): "State verification and DA verification can be performed, providing soft confirmation before L1 settlement."
Volition: The end user decides whether each transaction uses validium or rollup.
(1) Technical details
In the context of blockchain, data availability (DA) ensures that all necessary data for a transaction is available and accessible to network participants. Without proper DA, the chain cannot guarantee the validity of its transactions, which is critical to maintaining the trust and integrity of the system.
DA is essential for the following reasons:
Verification: Validators and network participants need access to all transaction data to verify the correctness of the chain state.
Security: Ensure that all data is available to prevent malicious actors from hiding invalid transactions in blocks.
Scalability: A proper DA mechanism allows the blockchain to handle more transactions by efficiently managing data storage and access.
(2) DA issues and light clients
The DA solution receives transaction data from other chains, stores this data, and makes it available for anyone to query.
Data availability issues occur when nodes in the network are unable to ensure that all necessary data for a transaction is available without downloading the entire block. This can lead to situations where invalid blocks are received due to some data being missing or hidden.
Thanks to the use of light clients, teams can trust that their data is stored by Avail.
As you may already know, most blockchain networks have their own validators who run full nodes to keep the network running 24/7. But not everyone can afford to run their own full node. First, it costs money to buy hardware, and second, it is extremely difficult to keep a node running 24/7 without the risk of losing the validator's stake. This is where light clients come in.
A light client is able to check if the data is properly saved without running a full node and downloading the entire block. A light client only needs to download a certain chunk of the block (a part of the block) and then create the entire block together - this is Data Availability Sampling (DAS).
Best of all, you can run a light node on almost any device, whether it’s a tablet or a smartphone. The more people running light nodes, the more people downloading these blocks, which means more blocks that can be expanded.
(3) Application ID
As mentioned above, AvailDA will support multiple modular blockchains at the same time, providing consensus and DA for each modular chain. So how does each chain know which data belongs to them? The answer is: application ID.
The header in Avail contains an index that helps a specific module chain (also called an "application" in the context of Avail) locate and download the chunks related to that specific application.
This operating model has several significant advantages:
Modular applications are minimally disturbed by other activities on the underlying layer.
Even though the block size is increasing, applications don’t have to retrieve more data. Instead of downloading the entire block, they only need to download the relevant block segments.
The entire block undergoes Data Availability Sampling (DAS), where the client randomly samples a small portion of the block to confirm data availability.
2. AVAIL Token
Now, let’s take a look at your main focus, AVAIL.
Along with the AvailDA mainnet launch, the Avail team also airdropped their AVAIL tokens to all eligible users.
So what is the purpose of this token? What can you do with it?
(1) AVAIL staking
AvailDA uses three types of nodes:
Light Node
Full Node
Validator Node
Now that we have discussed light nodes and full nodes, let’s look at validator nodes.
Validator nodes are essentially full nodes with staked assets and are responsible for generating blocks and maintaining the integrity of the network.
So far, Avail's validator set has been limited to 40-50 people who have demonstrated strong network performance and uptime in previous Avail test networks. In the next year or so, Avail will expand to 1000+ validators.
As for the rest of us, we can stake our AVAIL to one of these validators to help secure the network and all other modular chains deployed on AVAIL to earn validator rewards. These rewards can be more AVAIL tokens, or tokens from other rollups that your stake secures (“stake once, gain many”).
Staking process:
1) Get AVAIL:
Considering AVAIL has just been released, there aren’t many places where you can buy/sell AVAIL right now. But if you’re interested, these seem to be the first supporters of AVAIL (be careful with these exchanges, or you can wait for a bigger exchange to list AVAIL):
Bybit
Gate.io
Bitget
BingX
Mexico
2) Visit the Avail Staking Dashboard
3) Choose a staking method:
Direct Nomination: More direct control over the stake you “nominate” based on parameters such as reputation, commission rate, and diversification. While the direct nomination method does offer higher staking rewards, it does require stakers to be more vigilant about what is going on, and it also requires a minimum bond of 1,000 AVAIL to stake with a direct validator.
Nomination pool: Small stakers (requires at least 100 AVAIL) can choose a nomination pool, which is controlled by an operator who manages the selected validators and reward distribution on behalf of the pool members. In addition to simplicity, the advantages include lower entry barriers and lower risks.
4) Link your wallet (you will also need to hold AVAIL tokens in your wallet to pay network fees):
The following is a list of supported wallets:
5) Enter the amount you want to stake
6) Choose how you would like to receive your reward:
Withdraw: Allow anyone to withdraw your rewards at any time.
Synthesis: Allows anyone to increase your stake through syndication rewards, potentially generating higher staking returns.
Permission authorization: Only you (the wallet owner) can submit "withdraw" or "allow synthesis" transactions.
Other notes: Rewards must be claimed within a certain period of time (84 eras), otherwise they will be confiscated. The lock-up period is 28 days.
Governance:
The AVAIL token will also be used for network governance and will be rolled out in phases.
(2) What else can you do with AVAIL?
Again, since AVAIL is new, there aren’t a lot of apps that integrate with it yet. But here’s what you can do:
Trading perps on Aevo
Trading Futures on VALR
Perhaps most exciting is liquidity staking through deq.fi, a new native liquidity staking pool that just launched on Avail. Users can stake their AVAIL tokens here, obtain stAVAIL, and then use stAVAIL to explore other defi opportunities, with more opportunities to be announced in the coming days.
3. Avail Ecosystem: Who is using Avail?
If you’ve been following our newsletter, you probably already know where Avail is in terms of partnerships and integrations.
Looking at Ethereum alone, Avail has integrated five major rollup stacks: Optimism’s OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, Polygon CDK, Starknet Stack, and zkSync’s ZK Stack.
In addition, the network is also supported by other rollup frameworks such as Rollkit, Sovereign SDK, Stackr, Fluent, Cartesi, Dymension, Movement, and more.
In addition to the rollup framework, AvailDA also integrates multiple Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) solutions, including AltLayer, Conduit, Karnot, Ankr, Gateway, Gelato, PineX, and Snapchain.
Here’s a more comprehensive look at Avail’s rapidly growing ecosystem:
4 Conclusion
The launch of AvailDA marks another important milestone for the modular ecosystem. By separating the DA/consensus layer from the execution and settlement layer, AvailDA provides rollup developers with unprecedented flexibility and scalability. The innovative use of Data Availability Sampling (DAS) and light clients ensures reliable data verification while minimizing resource consumption. As Avail expands its validator set and integrates more applications, the Avail token will play a vital role in network security and governance.
With AvailDA quickly integrating with major rollup frameworks and RaaS solutions, the future of Avail looks bright. It will be interesting to see how AvailDA continues to expand.