In the new stage of "DA competition", why is Avail worth paying attention to?

Although the current crypto community's enthusiasm for technical narratives has waned, it is undeniable that since the Cancun upgrade, the transaction costs of the Ethereum ecosystem have dropped significantly, demonstrating the practical benefits of technological progress. Another major technical narrative in the current blockchain field is modularization. In the first half of the year, the performances of Celestia and EigenDA, two major modular blockchains, were brilliant. Last week, Avail, another leading player in modularization, 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 be used as the native asset of the Avail network 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 serving the same space but taking slightly different approaches to infrastructure stacks, execution, and listing. This article will introduce Avail's project details and product mechanisms to help understand how the head projects are designed and ultimately implemented as the current modular technology development enters a steady progress period.

The problem Avail wants to solve

Avail was first launched by Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun in 2020 and became independent as an 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, nor is it limited to a specific Rollup solution. Avail will provide services for all major Rollups.

Avail raised $27 million in financing in 2023. In June 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, and seriously restricted the scalability of blockchain. Data Availability Sampling (DAS) uses multiple rounds of random sampling to enable light nodes to confirm the availability of data without downloading the entire block, thereby reducing data verification costs by 99%. But the DA layer is a highly competitive field and must be differentiated by providing different guarantees, as well as building its own ecosystem as a moat.

An ecosystem is only as good as the interoperability between all the different chains in the ecosystem. The ultimate 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 these Rollups to perform different tasks.

Therefore, Avail pioneered the Avail Trinity approach, with Avail DA enhancing the scalability of Rollups and reducing operating costs; Nexus interoperability solving fragmentation problems and promoting the unification of Rollups; and Avail Fusion providing a shared security solution.

The DA layer is built specifically for data availability and is the bottom layer of the blockchain, with the lightest functionality required to build cross-ecosystem interoperability. As a lightweight but powerful ZK rollup running on Avail, Nexus supports cross-Rollup and cross-ecosystem settlements. Fusion Security can bring together the cryptoeconomic security of many tokens to serve and protect the Avail network.

The reason for this architecture is that the problem with blockchain today is that the user experience of trading across multiple chain networks is not yet ready for mass adoption. Although Rollup improves scalability by processing transactions off-chain, it adds complexity, resulting in higher transaction costs and fragmented liquidity, which affects the user experience and is not conducive to the mass adoption of blockchain technology.

Core Functions of Avail DA

From the architecture to the core data processing level, inspired by the cryptographic security of ZK technology, Avail uses validity proofs ( KZG commitments ), so that developers and users do not need to trust that Avail data is available, they can verify the data themselves.

Once the proof of validity is generated, the proof and verification becomes computationally efficient, providing data availability guarantees directly to different nodes in a highly scalable manner. Avail completes blocks in about 60 seconds, which is 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 guarantees, 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.

This makes Avail 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 within 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) , which marks 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 a custom ZK-coordinated Rollups based on Avail. In the multi-chain world, the user experience has long been negatively affected during the interaction between chains. If there is no fundamental change in composability, further increasing the number will cause greater problems. This is why Avail built Avail Nexus, which uses Avail DA as a trust root and acts as a verification center for unified Rollups.

The Fusion Security section allows the inclusion of external tokens in addition to Avail native tokens in the Avail DA consensus, providing strong cryptoeconomic guarantees 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 airdrops and public distribution account for 6%, ecosystem development 30%, community and research 23.88%, investors 14.12%, and core contributors 20%.

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 carried out through deq.fi . deq.fi is a new native liquidity staking pool just launched on Avail, where users can stake their AVAIL tokens and obtain stAVAIL, which can then be used to explore other contents of the ecosystem.

Speaking of staking, Avail adopts 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 be rewarded for their participation. The more tokens staked, the more secure the network is, because 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 protected by 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 unbinding process, which takes 28 days, during which time AVAIL tokens cannot be used or transferred.

Powerful Ecosystem

Avail's ultimate goal is to obtain ordered transaction data from all chains and aggregate them to Avail, making them the collaborative center of 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 transaction finality 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. At present, it has integrated payment chain Fuse, oracle service OpenLayer, IaaS protocol Neova, L1 Arcana, which focuses on chain abstraction and intent, and Blade Games, a full-chain game.

There are competitors in every field that Avail is developing, such as Celestia, EigenDA, Polygon's Agg Layer, etc. in the DA layer, or shared sequencers in the interoperability layer, and projects such as EigenLayer and Babylon 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 cryptoeconomic trust model and minimizes reliance on new cryptographic methods, thereby enhancing the stability and security of the system. This may prove to be the ultimate logical destination for the DA layer, as there is a natural synergy between the DA layer and interoperable solutions.

To date, modular technology advances have shown extraordinary potential, as many of the concepts were only imagined a few years ago. By fundamentally improving the way blockchains are built and used, the DA layer will undoubtedly become the core of this cycle and future technological developments. 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.

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