Avail's Data Availability Vision

*Forward the Original Title：Polygon Ex Co-Founder “Going Solo”：An Overview of Avail’s Data Availability Vision

Polygon was originally founded by three co-founders in 2017. However, in March 2023, one of the co-founders, Anurag Arjun, announced his departure, saying that he would lead his team to focus entirely on another new project.

The new project is Avail. Polygon, acting as a massive Layer2 aggregator, has internally explored various scaling directions over the years. In 2020, it initiated research on the modular blockchain project Avail. Perhaps Polygon is focusing on its own development, or perhaps Avail has substantial potential. From March 2023 onwards, Avail has spun off from Polygon and operates as an independent entity.

Since its spinoff, Avail started a three-month Kate Testnet in June, launched a “Data Attestation Bridge,” and cooperated with Equilibrium Group to open-source a new prototype of the Optimism EVM (OpEVM) Software Development Kit (SDK). Avail stated that the Kate testnet is expected to end in October, and the next significant progression is the launch of an incentivized testnet. The mainnet launch is projected for the fourth quarter of 2023 or the first quarter of 2024.

The difference between Avail and a monolithic blockchain

So what is Avail that makes Polygon co-creator Anurag Arjun choose to “Go Solo”? And what exactly is its purpose?

At the end of the day, Avail is still addressing the scalability issue of monolithic blockchains like Ethereum. Initially, it might have been called L3, or an off-chain scaling solution, or something else, but now Avail has found a more suitable term - modular blockchain.

The core components of blockchain technology include the consensus layer/execution layer, settlement layer and data availability layer. In traditional monolithic blockchain architectures like Ethereum and Solana, all these tasks are completed independently by a single system. Therefore, the scalability is limited. The design idea of ​​modular blockchain is to split these core functions into multiple modules, each of which can be executed by a dedicated provider, thereby achieving higher customization and scalability.

Modular blockchain focused on data availability layer

Avail is a provider that only focuses on the Data Availability Layer.

Avail can effectively sort and record transactions, provide data storage, and verify data availability. It supports blockchains compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and allows Rollup to publish data directly to Avail. Avail’s light client network verification mechanism (explained further below) lets Rollup on Avail verify status through the light client network, independent of smart contracts and base layers.

Avail’s design

Unlike other teams such as Ethereum that are trying to improve the data availability capabilities in existing blockchains, Avail is building a scalable data availability solution from scratch. The design of Avail will be analyzed from several aspects including the consensus mechanism, decentralization, and validity proof.

Consensus Mechanism

Different blockchains choose different security mechanisms according to their needs after balancing activity and security. And Avail chooses the ‘middle path’. It uses BABE and GRANDPA consensus mechanisms inherited from the Polkadot SDK. BABE acts as a block production engine and prioritizes activity by coordinating with validator nodes to identify new block producers. GRANDPA acts as a finality gadget, once more than two-thirds of the validators prove the chain containing the block, it can finalize all blocks leading to a specific block at the same time. This hybrid mechanism provides network resilience for Avail, allowing it to withstand temporary network partitions and a large number of node failures.

Decentralization

In terms of decentralization, Avail adopts Polkadot’s Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS), supporting up to 1000 validator nodes. NPoS also has an effective reward distribution that can reduce the risk of stake centralization.

In addition, Avail’s node functionality provides it with a unique fault-tolerant mechanism. The network architecture of monolithic blockchains consists of validator nodes, full nodes, and light clients, which can be viewed as playing the roles of craftsmen, quality inspectors, and consumers, respectively. However, Avail gives the quality inspector rights of full nodes to light clients. Light clients use Data Availability Sampling (DAS) for verification, a process in which light clients request a small random portions of each block. This method can provide the same level of security assurance as traditional full nodes. In Avail’s design, full nodes still exist but are almost viewed as backup tools to maintain high data redundancy on the network. This design prevents Avail from relying on full nodes to fetch data during network interruptions or bottlenecks, thereby preventing the risk of full nodes colluding.

Validity Proof

When it comes to modularization, we have to mention Celestia, which has recently become popular due to the launch of its token. There was a little misunderstanding between Avail and Celestia. In June 2021, when Polygon just deployed Avail, Mustafa Al-Bassam, the co-founder of Celestia, claimed that Avail’s introduction almost copied verbatim from his blog post introducing Celestia written in 2019. Setting aside the plagiarism, he welcomed more teams to enter the field of data availability. In response, MihailoBjelic, the co-founder of Polygon, apologized to Celestia and its community for the mistake made by the marketing and content team.

Although both have many similarities at the data availability level, Avail and Celestia are different in validity proof. Avail adopts KZG polynomial commitments (KZG commitments), which can reduce memory, bandwidth, and storage requirements and provide conciseness. The combination of KZG commitments and Avail’s light clients accelerates the verification process on Avail. On the other hand, Celestia uses fraud proof technology, which is much faster to generate than KZG commitments. But because the scale of its sample data is larger, it requires slightly higher communication bandwidth.

Avail’s KZG polynomial commitments refer to the commitments generated by block producers when producing blocks, which summarize the data in the entire row of Avail blocks. During the verification phase, light clients view the commitments in the block header and verify the proof of each unit based on the commitments, thereby confirming the availability of all data in the block. This is done to increase the data throughput on the chain and solve performance bottlenecks.

Conclusion

In summary, although Avail is still some time away from launching its mainnet, its role as a modular data availability solution provides a new direction for the development and exploration of blockchain technology. Currently, more and more industry participants are facing the challenge of high-cost growth due to limited block space, and this challenge will become increasingly severe in the future. A scalable data availability layer is crucial for effectively expanding blockchain. Where developers choose to build their projects will determine whether they hold a competitive advantage in the years to come.

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