Despite the decreased enthusiasm in the encryption community for technical narratives, it is undeniable that since the Cancun upgrade, the Transaction Cost of the Ethereum ecosystem has significantly decreased, demonstrating the practical benefits of technological progress. Another major technical narrative in the current blockchain field is modularity. In the first half of the year, the performances of two major modular blockchains, Celestia and EigenDA, were splendid. Last week, Avail, another leading player in modularity, also embarked on a new chapter.

On July 23, Avail announced the launch of Avail DA Mainnet and the listing of AVAIL Token. AVAIL will serve as the native asset of the Avail network, used to pay for DA fees and ensure network security through stake. In addition, AVAIL holders will be able to start staking AVAIL.

Avail, EigenDA, and Celestia are the protagonists of the DA ecosystem - each serving the same space, but taking slightly different approaches in infrastructure stack, execution, and listing. This article will introduce the project details and product mechanism of Avail to help understand how top projects are designed and ultimately implemented as modular technology development enters a steady phase of advancement.

Avail The problem to be solved

Avail was initially 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 it is not dependent on any specific Rollup solution and is not limited to any specific Rollup solution. Avail will serve all major Rollup solutions.

Avail raised $27 million through financing in 2023, and in June of this year, Avail’s total financing reached $75 million, further driving its layout in the Web3 field.

Data availability is an important component of the modular blockchain architecture. In the past, each node needed to download all transaction data to verify its availability, which was inefficient and costly, severely limiting the scalability of the blockchain. Data Availability Sampling (DAS) allows light nodes to confirm the availability of data without downloading the entire block through long rounds of random sampling, reducing data verification costs by 99%. However, the DA layer is a fiercely competitive field that must differentiate itself by providing different guarantees and establishing its own ecosystem as a moat.

The health of an ecosystem depends on the interoperability of all different chains in the ecosystem. Avail’s ultimate vision is to create ‘a unified Rollup ecosystem’. To achieve this goal, a trusted and neutral third party is needed to coordinate communication between different Rollups and enable them to perform different tasks.

Therefore, Avail first adopted the Avail Trinity “trinity” method, Avail DA enhances the scalability of Rollup and reduces operating costs; Nexus interoperability solves the fragmentation problem and promotes the unity of Rollup; Avail Fusion provides a shared security solution.

The DA layer is built for data availability and is the bottom layer of the blockchain, with the lightest functionality required for cross-ecosystem interoperability. Nexus is a lightweight but powerful ZK rollup running on Avail, supporting cross-rollup and cross-ecosystem settlement. Fusion Security can aggregate the encryption economic security of numerous tokens to serve and protect the Avail network.

The reason for adopting such an architecture is that the current problem with the blockchain is that the user experience for cross-chain network transactions is not yet ready for large-scale adoption. Although Rollup improves scalability by processing transactions off-chain, it increases complexity, resulting in fragmented transaction costs and liquidity, which affects the user experience and is not conducive to the large-scale adoption of blockchain technology.

Core Features of Avail DA

From the architectural implementation 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 rely on the availability of Avail data, they can verify the data themselves.

Once the validity proof is generated, the efficiency of the proof and verification calculations will be very high, providing data availability guarantees to different Nodes in a highly scalable manner. Avail completes Block in approximately 60 seconds, which is one of the fastest verification times provided by data availability providers today.

In addition, Avail DA has a P2P network consisting of long light clients, from which samples can be taken. These light clients not only verify data availability guarantees, but also ensure the availability of the data itself. They will 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 a full Node. As long as there is a long enough light client, 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). This marks an important milestone for the Blockchain Community as it enables Rollups to achieve similar functionality and benefits as the complete Danksharding roadmap of ETH today.

Given that this article mainly introduces and discusses DA related content, Avail Nexus and Avail Fusion zones are only briefly mentioned here.

Avail Nexus is a custom ZK coordination Rollups based on Avail. In the multi-chain world, the interaction between chains has already had a negative impact on the user experience. If the fundamental change in composability is not made, further increasing the quantity will lead to bigger problems. This is the reason why Avail builds Avail Nexus, which uses Avail DA as the trust root and acts as the validation center for unified Rollups.

The Fusion Security section allows external tokens other than the Avail native Token to be included in the Avail DA Consensus, providing strong encryption economic security, strengthening Avail’s function as a Web3 unified layer.

How to participate in the entire system by staking AVAIL Token

With the release of AvailDA Mainnet, the Avail team also Airdropped AVAIL Tokens to all eligible users. The total amount is 10 billion, of which Airdrop and public distribution account for 6%, ecosystem development accounts for 30%, community and research accounts for 23.88%, investors account for 14.12%, and core contributors account for 20%.

AVAIL has a wide range of uses, with simple ecosystem governance and Liquiditystake. The official has not yet provided a detailed plan for the former, but the latter can be done through deq.fi. deq.fi is a newly launched native Liquiditystake pool on Avail, where users can stake their AVAIL Tokens to obtain stAVAIL, which can then be used to explore other content in the ecosystem.

When it comes to stake, Avail adopts the Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) Consensus Mechanism inherited from the Substrate ecosystem. Stake plays a crucial 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 longer the Token is staked, the higher the network security, as malicious actors would need to acquire a significant portion of staked Tokens to successfully attack the network.

Therefore, Avail’s DA, Nexus, and Fusion security layers will all be protected through Avail Tokenstake.

Avail DA stake: Users can stake AVAIL Tokens to validators or nomination pools to help secure the network and support various use cases such as Web3 games, Decentralized Finance platforms, etc. Stakers can receive stake rewards as a result.

To improve the efficiency and fairness of transaction processing, the sorter requires staking AVAIL Tokens to participate in the submission and sorting of transaction batches. Those who perform well will be rewarded, while those who perform poorly will be penalized.

Avail Fusion stake: The stake is not limited to AVAIL Token, but also includes other mainstream encryption assets such as BTC, ETH, etc., enhancing the security of the entire network, and stakeholders will receive corresponding rewards accordingly.

It is worth noting that to remove stake from the Avail network, the nominator must complete the unbonding process, which takes 28 days, during which time AVAIL Token cannot be used or transferred.

Powerful ecosystem

Avail’s ultimate goal is to obtain ordered transaction data from all chains and aggregate them into Avail, making them the collaborative center of all web3. This ‘neutral’ position allows for greater interoperability and capital flow, and can also attract non-Ethereum-centric ecosystems.

From Ethereum, avail has integrated five major rollup stacks, including the op stack, arbitrum orbit, polygon cdk, starknet stack, and zksync’s zk stack. In addition to rollup, avail da also integrates a long rollup-as-a-service solution, including altlayer, conduit, karnot, ankr, Gateway, gelato, pinex, and snapchain.

Avail is also continuing to strengthen its presence in the BTC ecosystem. Currently, Avail has integrated BVM, dWallet, Rooch, LayerEdge, and other BTC L2 and BTC extension layer Side Protocols. L2 publishes transaction data to Avail DA, which not only has low costs, but also achieves transaction finality in approximately 40 seconds. In addition, Avail will enable interoperability between BTC L2 and Avail Nexus.

Avail has also made progress in integrating with application chains. Currently, it has integrated payment chain FUSE, Oracle Machine service OpenLayer, IaaS protocol Neova, L1 Arcana, which focuses on chain abstraction and intention, and the entire chain game Blade Games.

In every area that Avail is developing, there are competitors, such as Celestia, EigenDA, and Agg Layer of Polygon in the DA layer, as well as shared sequencers in the interoperability layer, and projects like EigenLayer and Babylon for shared security.

But Avail integrates the data availability layer, interoperability layer, and shared security to provide a comprehensive and efficient blockchain solution. It maintains the existing encryption-based trust model and minimizes reliance on new cryptographic methods, thereby enhancing system stability and security. This may prove to be the ultimate logical destination for the DA layer, as there is a natural synergy between the DA layer and interoperability solutions.

So far, modular technology 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 precise grasp of technology trends, but also heralds its important position in the future blockchain ecosystem.