Odaily exclusive interview with Avail: Preparing for future DA infrastructure competition from the perspective of Rollup

Original｜Odaily Planet Daily

Author｜jk

Since the end of last year, DA (Data Availability) has become a hot new star track in the encryption industry. The data availability layer has become an important part of the modular architecture. The core function of the DA layer is to ensure that the data on the chain is available to all network participants. and access.

DA track projects have also sprung up. Well-known ones include Celestia, EigenLayer, NearDA and Avail. Although the goals are the same, the major projects have differences in infrastructure stacks, execution routes and incentive models.

Due to the previous sharp increase in TIA and the popularity of re-pledge projects based on EigenLayer, users in the Chinese area may be more familiar with Celesta and EigenLayer, and Avail, which has just announced a US$27 million financing, may be the next target worthy of in-depth attention.

**Avail’s mission is to simplify the Rollup experience and provide a unified and efficient platform for users and developers from various ecosystems. To achieve this goal, Avail has been building a unified infrastructure layer, Avail Trinity, including a base data availability (DA) layer, a Nexus unified layer and an additional security layer called Fusion. **

Odaily Planet Daily conducted an exclusive interview with Avail co-founder Anurag Arjun. Anurag introduced in detail the origin and vision, route and plans of Avail, as well as what points we should pay attention to and what opportunities we should participate in.

Financing and background

On February 26, Web3 infrastructure layer Avail announced the completion of a $27 million seed round of financing, led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly, with participation from SevenX Ventures, Figment, Nomad Capital and several angel investors.

Its team started at Polygon in 2020 and was spun off from the Polygon ecosystem in early 2023, led by former Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun and former head of research Prabal Banerjee.

Avail said it will use the new financing to accelerate the development of its three core products, DA, Nexus and Fusion. These core components that make up Avail Trinity will enable the network to lay the foundation for Web3 unification.

Avail’s first component, Avail DA, solves the scalability problem by ensuring scalable and secure data availability. **Avail DA layer has validity proof and data availability sampling (DAS) functions. And unlike other DAs that rely on Optimism, Avail’s use of proof of validity increases transaction speed by 10 times, giving end users a unified experience that is more responsive.

Avail Nexus, the second component of Avail, will serve as a verification center, using Avail DA as the foundation of trust to unify the Avail ecosystem inside and outside. **Avail Nexus is a zero-knowledge proof-based aggregation on Avail DA, consisting of a proof aggregation/verification layer and a sequencer selection mechanism that will be effective by embedding the Avail DAS light client based on validity proofs and performing proof aggregation run. **The aggregated evidence itself will also be sent to Ethereum.

Finally, to ensure the consistency of Avail’s technology stack, Avail is building Fusion security - the third part of the Avail trinity, introducing native assets including BTC, ETH and other mature ecosystems to provide additional security to the Avail ecosystem . **In addition to adding security, this also brings ETH, BTC and other new assets into play at the base layer, further increasing their utility.

Based on this architecture, Anurag Arjun told Odaily Planet Daily in detail how to realize the vision of “seamless unified Web3 ecosystem” as mentioned above. The following is the interview transcript, compiled and edited by Odaily Planet Daily ~

Interview Q&A

**Q1. First of all, we are curious about the origin of Avail. How did it separate from Polygon and become a completely independent project? Can you briefly introduce the history of Avail? **

Anurag Arjun: I entered the cryptocurrency space in 2017. Prior to this, I had been working in fintech and technical product engineering.

In 2017, I co-founded Polygon and built a large number of Polygon technology stacks, including Plasma and PoS bridges, and also developed a zero-knowledge proof strategy.

In late 2020, when we officially launched Polygon PoS and things started to stabilize, I started thinking about what to do next. Projects like Polygon POS, I know will eventually move to zero-knowledge proofs.

So last year, you saw the launch of other projects like Polygon’s zkEVM. At the end of 2020, we launched Project Avail internally.

**Q2. What is the motivation for starting Avail, and what problems does Avail solve in the industry? **

Anurag Arjun: Ethereum was originally on the sharding roadmap, but in 2020, Ethereum released a roadmap centered on Rollup. This is so important that Rollup is now generally considered the preferred solution for expansion.

Before Rollup was invented, the only way to start a chain was to build the chain, recruit validators, issue tokens, and ensure that the tokens had value to ensure sufficient cryptoeconomic security. If you want to start a chain, you have to do everything L1 has to deal with.

With Rollup, projects no longer need to invent their own security mechanisms, recruit validators, or issue tokens. Because any Rollup built on the underlying base layer shares or borrows the security of the base layer. This is a very big innovation, because now the project does not need to focus on economic security, but can focus on business logic, etc. This is why Rollup has become so popular in the past two or three years.

Today, approximately 40 to 50 L2 Rollups are about to be launched, with probably hundreds more in development. We’re entering a Rollup-centric future. **We want to create a platform that solves the problems that a “Rollup-centric future” will face. **

First, the main problem that Avail solves is how to increase the number of Rollups or how to expand Rollups. Rollup is very hungry for data availability and needs to guarantee transaction ordering.

To support a large number of Rollups, the industry needs to have scalable data availability components. **Avail’s first component, Avail DA, is a scalable, state-of-the-art data availability solution built on the same technical primitives that Ethereum will use on its data sharding roadmap to enable data Availability sampling. **

Avail has been building a solution to this problem for the past three years, and now it’s nearing completion, with release expected in the second quarter of this year.

But we don’t stop there.

Imagine that after Avail DA solves the scalability problem of Rollup, hundreds or thousands of Rollups will emerge, and the user experience will be very fragmented**. So, the second part of Avail, we’re also announcing Avail Nexus today - a unified framework that brings these Rollups together to connect and communicate with each other. **Users don’t need to deal with the complexity of facing these chains, just express intent and Avail Nexus will handle all routing etc. So this is the lower level infrastructure so that we abstract and aggregate all of these Rollups.

We also announced today the final part of Avail - Avail Fusion, the Fusion security layer that provides a unified framework and unified security. Previously, people often relied on native tokens for cryptographic security. In the future, Fusion can enable other assets (such as BTC) to be added, thereby adding cryptoeconomic security.

Overall, those are the three things I want to announce today. These are also our motivations for building Avail.

**Q3. I also have a question about the product itself, that is, how does Avail solve compatibility issues within the existing blockchain ecosystem? What are the differences in integration between EVM and non-EVM? **

**Anurag Arjun: **Avail is a trusted, neutral Rollup agnostic framework that does not perform any operations itself. The operation will be performed by Rollup running on Avail. Therefore, we are compatible with EVM Rollup, as Avail has integrated with Optimism (OP Stack), Arbitrum, Polygon zkEVM and ZK Sync, is also working with non-EVM StarkWare, and also integrates with Sovereign Labs and Stacker.

You’ll find that all types of execution environments can run on Avail. We use the zero-knowledge proof aggregation principle to connect these rollups together, and the sample combination of data availability is based on valid proofs, so that different types of rollups can communicate with each other.

**Q4. Avail has been developed for a long time. What challenges have it encountered? How were these challenges overcome? **

**Anurag Arjun:**Avail is trying to meet the needs of the market that have grown in the last one or two years.

As a very valuable chain, Ethereum protects a value of at least hundreds of billions of dollars. While Ethereum is still working on its own scalability roadmap, upgrades always take some time.

**Rollup Stacks are popping up like crazy. In addition to the leading Ethereum L2 Rollup Stacks such as Polygon, Arbitrum, ZkSync, StarkWare, and Optimism, there are about 5-10 other Rollup Stacks under construction, and we are very actively involved in them. **

These Rollup Stacks are like SDKs. In the future, there will be hundreds or thousands of chains on each Rollup Stack. Rollups hope that developers can speed up the construction of application chains and that users can enjoy cheap fees.

Therefore, our challenge is to meet market demand as much as possible and reduce data availability costs when Rollup needs to expand.

In addition, users also need us to solve the problem of “experience fragmentation”. That’s why Avail Nexus is so important. We will address this fundamental need over the next 6-12 months.

**Q 5. Next, let us talk about the comparison of competing products. While I’m not going to name names, there are already some very well-known competitors in data availability (DA). Perhaps, it is still in the early stages of DA development. How does Avail view its relationships with competitors in terms of collaboration or competition? Has the presence of competitors prompted Avail to adjust its strategies or goals? **

**Anurag Arjun: **Going back to the motivation for building Avail, it solves the ancillary problems of Rollup upgrading the core functionality, but as I said, DA is only one component of this.

Many competitors focus solely on DA components. Of course, there are a lot of very talented teams that do this very well. Each team is following their own approach to implementation.

We use more proof-of-guaranteed implementations and data availability sampling. Others take an approach more based on proof of fraud.

I think that, in essence, scalable DA has been solved and the DA part is going to become very generalized and commoditized and a lower value area. The reason we built our DA using Proofs of Guarantee and Data Availability Sampling is so we can enable Avail Nexus on top. Avail Nexus would not be possible without a specific implementation of Avail.

Things that are just DA are going to become very commoditized. So while we certainly have comparative solutions, that’s not where we think the value is. We focus on how to help Rollup expand, create communication and connections, and increase security.

Competition is a good thing, it motivates us to do more and work harder. I value the work of all competitors and look forward to scaling blockchain together.

**Q 6. So in the early stages, how does Avail plan to differentiate itself from its competitors? **

**Anurag Arjun:**Essentially, our value proposition is that there will be a lot of Rollups and we will of course launch with other solutions as well.

The core question is, why do we build a “trinity”? It is to make this technology accessible to mainstream users. If we showed all the complexity of rollups and chains to mainstream users, it wouldn’t work. Many talented teams are building the Rollup Stack. Each of them will occupy a position and iterate the product, and we will unifiedly interconnect them so that users can have a seamless experience. **This will be the main place.

**Q 7. What are Avail’s future development plans? Are there any important milestones or potential airdrops to look forward to? **

Anurag Arjun: In terms of time plan, Avail’s DA release is expected to be in the first half of the year, which is very close. **The first version of Avail Nexus is expected to be available by the end of this year, with Avail Fusion Security expected to be available next year. This is the product development timeline. **

At the moment, I don’t want to comment on any of the airdrops themselves, but of course, there will be a lot of community activity going on. Avail is a community project, essentially building the entire Avail ecosystem. Therefore, we intend to develop this project together with our partners and the community.

**Q 8. Last question, do you have anything to say to Chinese market developers and partners who want to join the Avail ecosystem? **

**Anurag Arjun:**Blockchain practitioners are constantly innovating. We’re always exploring ways to build the next generation of blockchain, and Rollup is an underrated innovation. When it was invented in 2019, 2020, not many people knew about it, but now slowly, people are starting to see many teams launching their own Rollup.

In my opinion, Rollup is not necessarily just EVM Rollup, but can be in any type of execution environment. We are particularly optimistic about application-specific Rollup. **This means that when developers build applications, they no longer just write smart contracts and then build applications on top of them, but will replace them with very lightweight chains. **

To give an analogy, it’s like accessing apps on the internet today. For example, when you go to Amazon or any other e-commerce website to shop, when wanting to pay a merchant, the user thinks they are communicating with Amazon, but the way Amazon is architected is on the backend, communicating with many actors. When you want to buy something, Amazon sends a request to Visa’s microservices or Stripe’s microservices. When you send your payment details, they are verified and Visa replies whether the payment was successfully completed.

So what I’m saying is that Web2 applications “work” - there’s a lot of complexity behind them, but the users don’t really feel it. Applications on the Internet use asynchronous network services.

I think the next evolution of blockchain applications will be very similar to Internet applications. There will be a series of complex operations taking place on the backend, but the user will not be directly involved.

**Web3 will be a monolith, with many applications running in parallel and communicating asynchronously. The blockchain technology we are introducing will serve the next generation of Web3. Avail will take a leadership role in this effort. **

The Chinese community has been very active in development and there has been a lot of innovation in the fintech space. So I think it’s a good thing to be involved in the Rollup technology space. Of course, it also includes Avail technology construction. In the future, blockchain applications will be implemented through Rollup and unified infrastructure.