Although the current crypto community's enthusiasm for technology narratives has waned, it is undeniable that since the Cancun upgrade, the transaction costs of the Ethereum ecosystem have dropped significantly, demonstrating the actual benefits of technological progress. Another major technology narrative in the current blockchain field is modularization. In the first half of the year, Celestia and EigenDA, two major modular blockchains, performed brilliantly. Last week, Avail, another leading modular player, also opened a new chapter.
On July 23, Avail announced the launch of the Avail DA mainnet and the launch of the AVAIL token. AVAIL will serve as the native asset of the Avail network, used to pay DA fees and ensure network security through staking. In addition, AVAIL holders will be able to start staking AVAIL.
Avail, EigenDA, and Celestia are the protagonists in the DA ecosystem—each of them serves the same space, but takes slightly different approaches in terms of infrastructure stack, execution, and listing. This article will introduce the project details and product mechanism of Avail to help understand how the head project is designed and finally implemented at a time when the development of modular technology has entered a steady progress period.
The problem that Avail is trying to solve
Avail was first launched by Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun in 2020 and became an independent entity in March 2023. Its goal is to build a neutral platform through data sampling, which means that it does not rely on any specific Rollup solution or is limited to a specific Rollup solution. Avail will provide services for all major Rollups.
Avail raised $27 million in financing in 2023. In June of this year, Avail's total financing amount reached $75 million, further promoting its layout in the Web3 field.
Data availability is an important part of modular blockchain architecture. In the past, each node needed to download all transaction data to verify its availability, which was inefficient and costly, severely restricting the scalability of blockchain. Data Availability Sampling (DAS) reduces data verification costs by 99% through multiple rounds of random sampling, allowing light nodes to confirm data availability without downloading the entire block. However, the DA layer is a highly competitive field and must be differentiated by providing different guarantees and building its own ecosystem as a moat.
An ecosystem is only as good as the interoperability of all the different chains in it. The end result envisioned by Avail is "a unified Rollup ecosystem." To achieve this goal, a trusted, neutral third party is needed to coordinate communications between different Rollups and allow them to perform different tasks.
Therefore, Avail took the lead in adopting the Avail Trinity approach. Avail DA enhances the scalability of Rollup and reduces operating costs; Nexus interoperability solves the fragmentation problem and promotes the unification of Rollup; Avail Fusion provides a shared security solution.
The DA layer is purpose-built for data availability and is the bottom layer of the blockchain, with the lightest functionality needed to build cross-ecosystem interoperability. Nexus, a lightweight but powerful ZK rollup running on top of Avail, supports cross-Rollup and cross-ecosystem settlement. Fusion Security can aggregate the crypto-economic security of numerous tokens to serve and secure the Avail network.
The reason for adopting such an architecture is that the problem with blockchain today is that the user experience of transactions across multiple chain networks is not yet ready for mass adoption. Although Rollup improves scalability by processing transactions off-chain, it increases complexity, leading to higher transaction costs and fragmented liquidity, which affects the user experience and is not conducive to the mass adoption of blockchain technology.
Avail DA's core features
From the architecture to the core data processing level, inspired by the cryptographic security of ZK technology, Avail uses validity proof (KZG commitment) so that developers and users do not need to believe that Avail data is available, they can verify the data themselves.
Once a proof of validity is generated, proving and verifying becomes computationally efficient, providing data availability guarantees directly to different nodes in a highly scalable manner. Avail finalizes blocks in approximately 60 seconds, one of the fastest verification times offered by data availability providers today.
In addition, Avail DA has a P2P network of multiple light clients from which to sample. These light clients not only verify the data availability guarantee, but also ensure the availability of the data itself. They keep available data samples in the P2P network, and as the number of light clients increases, the data availability increases.
In this way, Avail becomes a DA layer that can sample data from its light client P2P network without relying on full nodes. As long as there are enough light clients, the P2P network can theoretically have all the data units in a block, allowing users to query the entire block without relying on RPC.
Avail DA is the only data availability layer that combines KZG commitments with Data Availability Sampling (DAS), marking an important milestone for the blockchain community as it enables Rollups to achieve features and benefits similar to Ethereum’s full Danksharding roadmap today.
Since this article mainly introduces and discusses DA-related content, the Avail Nexus and Avail Fusion sections are only briefly mentioned here.
Avail Nexus is based on Avail’s custom ZK-coordinated Rollups. In the multi-chain world, user experience has long been negatively impacted during the interaction between chains. If there is no fundamental change in composability, further increasing the number will lead to bigger problems. This is why Avail built Avail Nexus, which uses Avail DA as the root of trust and acts as the verification center for unified Rollups.
The Fusion Security part allows the inclusion of external tokens in addition to Avail native tokens in the Avail DA consensus, providing strong crypto-economic protection and strengthening Avail's function as a unified layer for Web3.
How to participate in the entire system by staking AVAIL tokens
Along with the launch of the AvailDA mainnet, the Avail team also airdropped AVAIL tokens to all eligible users. The total amount is 10 billion, of which 6% is airdropped and public distribution, 30% is ecosystem development, 23.88% is community and research, 14.12% is investors, and 20% is core contributors.
AVAIL has a wide range of uses, including ecosystem governance and liquidity staking. The official has not yet given a detailed plan for the former, but the latter can be done through deq.fi. deq.fi is a new native liquidity staking pool just launched on Avail, where users can stake their AVAIL tokens, obtain stAVAIL, and then use stAVAIL to explore other content in the ecosystem.
Speaking of staking, Avail uses the Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) consensus mechanism inherited from the Substrate ecosystem. Staking plays a vital role in the NPoS consensus mechanism. By staking AVAIL tokens, users can contribute to the security of the network and receive rewards for their participation. The more tokens staked, the more secure the network is, as malicious actors need to obtain a large portion of the staked tokens to successfully attack the network.
Therefore, Avail’s DA, Nexus, and Fusion security layers will all be secured through Avail token staking.
Avail DA Staking: Users can stake AVAIL tokens to validators or nomination pools to help ensure network operation and support various application scenarios such as Web3 games, DeFi platforms, etc. Stakers can therefore receive staking rewards.
Avail Nexus Staking: In order to improve the efficiency and fairness of transaction processing, the sorter needs to stake AVAIL tokens to participate in the submission and sorting of transaction batches. Those with outstanding performance will be rewarded, and those with poor performance will be punished.
Avail Fusion Staking: Staking is not limited to AVAIL tokens, but also includes other mainstream crypto assets such as BTC, ETH, etc., which enhances the security of the entire network, and stakers receive corresponding rewards accordingly.
It is worth noting that to remove staking from the Avail network, nominators must complete the unbonding process, which takes 28 days, during which time AVAIL tokens cannot be used or transferred.
Strong ecosystem
The ultimate goal of Avail is to take ordered transaction data from all chains and aggregate them to Avail, making them the collaborative hub for all web3. This "neutral" stance allows for greater interoperability and capital flow, and can also attract non-Ethereum-centric ecosystems.
From the perspective of Ethereum, Avail has integrated five major Rollup stacks, including OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, Polygon CDK, Starknet Stack, and zkSync's ZK Stack. In addition to Rollup, Avail DA has also integrated multiple Rollup-as-a-service solutions, including AltLayer, Conduit, Karnot, Ankr, Gateway, Gelato, PineX, and Snapchain.
Avail is also continuing to make efforts in the Bitcoin ecosystem. At present, Avail has integrated Bitcoin L2 such as BVM, dWallet, Rooch, LayerEdge and Bitcoin extension layer Side Protocol. L2 publishes transaction data to Avail DA, which is not only low-cost but also can achieve the finality of transactions in about 40 seconds. In addition, Avail will also make interoperability between Bitcoin L2 and Avail Nexus possible.
Avail has also made progress in integrating with application chains. Currently, it has integrated payment chain Fuse, oracle service OpenLayer, IaaS protocol Neova, L1 Arcana that focuses on chain abstraction and intent, and full-chain game Blade Games.
There are competitors in every area that Avail is developing, such as Celestia, EigenDA, Polygon's Agg Layer, etc. in the DA layer, or shared sequencers within the interoperability layer, and projects such as EigenLayer, Babylon, etc. for shared security.
But Avail aims to provide a comprehensive and efficient blockchain solution by integrating the data availability layer, interoperability layer, and shared security. It maintains the existing crypto-economic trust model and minimizes reliance on new cryptographic methods, thereby enhancing the stability and security of the system. This may prove to be the final logical destination of the DA layer, as there is a natural synergy between the DA layer and interoperability solutions.
So far, modular technology progress has shown extraordinary potential, as many concepts were only imagined a few years ago. By fundamentally improving the way blockchain is built and used, the DA layer will undoubtedly become the core of this cycle and future technological development. Avail's forward-looking layout not only reflects its accurate grasp of technological trends, but also indicates its important position in the future blockchain ecosystem.