Original | Odaily
Author | jk
Since the end of last year, DA (Data Availability) has become a hot new trend in the cryptocurrency industry. The availability of data has become an important component of modular architecture, and the core function of the DA layer is to ensure that on-chain data is available for all network participants to use and access.
Numerous projects have emerged in the DA space, including well-known ones such as Celestia, EigenLayer, NearDA, and Avail. Although they share the same goal, these projects differ in terms of infrastructure stack, execution roadmap, and incentive model.
Due to the significant rise of TIA and the popularity of staking projects based on EigenLayer, Chinese users may be more familiar with Celestia and EigenLayer. However, Avail, which recently announced a $27 million financing, may be the next target worth paying attention to.
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 called Avail Trinity, which includes the foundational Data Availability (DA) layer, Nexus unified layer, and additional security layer Fusion.
Odaily conducted an exclusive interview with Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail. Anurag provides detailed insights into the origin, vision, roadmap, and opportunities we should focus on and participate in.
Financing and Background
On February 26, Web3 infrastructure layer Avail announced the completion of a $27 million seed round financing. It was led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly, with participation from SevenX Ventures, Figment, Nomad Capital, and several angel investors.
The team started on Polygon in 2020 and separated from the Polygon ecosystem in early 2023. It is led by Anurag Arjun, former co-founder of Polygon, and Prabal Banerjee, former head of research at Polygon.
Avail plans to leverage the new funding 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 provide...Web3 lays the foundation for unity.
The first component of Avail, Avail DA, addresses scalability issues by ensuring scalable and secure data availability. The Avail DA layer features proof of validity and data availability sampling (DAS) capabilities. Unlike other DA solutions that rely on Optimism, Avail utilizes the use of proof of validity to increase transaction speed by 10 times, providing end users with a faster unified experience.
The second component of Avail, Avail Nexus, serves as a validation center and unifies the Avail ecosystem both internally and externally with Avail DA as its trust foundation. Avail Nexus aggregates proof based on zero-knowledge proofs and consists of proof aggregation/validation layers and a sequence generator selection mechanism. By embedding Avail DAS lightweight clients and executing proof aggregation based on validity proof, this mechanism ensures efficient operation. The aggregated evidence itself will also be sent to Ethereum.
Lastly, to ensure the consistency of the Avail technology stack, Avail is building Fusion Security, the third part of the Avail Trinity, which introduces native assets from mature ecosystems such as BTC, ETH, and others to provide additional security for the Avail ecosystem. In addition to enhancing security, this also allows ETH, BTC, and other new assets to play a role at the foundational level, further increasing their utility.
Based on this architecture, Anurag Arjun explains in detail to Odaily how the vision of a "seamlessly unified Web3 ecosystem" is being implemented. The following is an interview transcript compiled and edited by Odaily~
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 field in 2017. Before that, I had been working in the fintech and technical product engineering fields.
In 2017, I co-founded Polygon and built a significant portion of the Polygon technology stack, including Plasma, PoS bridge, and developed zero-knowledge proof strategies.
In 2020,At the end of the year, as we officially launched Polygon PoS and everything started to stabilize, I began to consider what to do next. For projects like Polygon PoS, I knew that eventually it would transition to zero-knowledge proofs. So last year, you saw the launch of other projects like zkEVM on Polygon. At the end of 2020, we internally started the Avail project. Q2. What was the motivation behind launching Avail, and what problems does Avail solve in the industry?
Anurag Arjun: Ethereum originally had a roadmap for sharding, but in 2020, Ethereum released a roadmap centered around Rollup. This is significant to the extent that now people generally consider Rollup as the preferred scaling solution.
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 have value to ensure sufficient cryptographic security, and so on. If you want to start a chain, you must do everything L1 has to face.
With Rollup, project teams no longer need to invent their own security mechanisms, recruit validators, or issue tokens. Because any Rollup built on top of the underlying layer shares or borrows the security of the underlying layer. This is a very big innovation because now projects don't need to focus on economic security, they can focus on business logic, and so on. This is also why Rollup has been popular in the past two to three years.
Today, about 40 to 50 L2 Rollups are about to be launched, and there may be hundreds more in development. We are entering a future centered around Rollup. We want to create a platform to address the problems that will be faced in the "Rollup-centered future".
First, the main problem Avail solves is how to increase the number of Rollups or how to scale Rollups. Rollup is very eager for data availability and needs to ensure transaction ordering.
To support a large number of Rollups, the industry needs scalable data availability components. The first component of Avail - Avail DA, is a scalable, state-of-the-art data availability solution, built on the same technical primitives that Ethereum will use in its data sharding roadmap, to achieve data availability sampling.
Avail has been building a solution to this problem for the past three years, and now it is about to be completed, with an expected release in the second quarter of this year.
However, we won't stop there.
Imagine, after Avail DA solves the scalability problem of Rollup, hundreds or thousands of Rollups emerge, the user experience will be very fragmented. Therefore, Avail's second part, which we also announce today, Avail Nexus - a unified framework that aggregates these Rollups, can connect and communicate with each other. Users don't need to deal with the complexity of these chains, they just need to express their intent, and Avail Nexus will handle all routing, and so on. So, this is a more underlying infrastructure, so that we can abstract and aggregate all these Rollups.
We also announced today; The final part of Avail - Avail Fusion, Fusion security layer, provides a unified framework and unified security. Previously, for encryption security, people usually relied on native tokens. In the future, Fusion will allow other assets (such as BTC) to join in, thereby accumulating encryption economic security. In summary, these are the three things I want to announce today. These are also the motivations for building Avail. Q3. I have another question about the product itself, how does Avail solve compatibility issues in 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. Operations will be performed by the Rollup running on Avail. Therefore, we are compatible with EVM Rollup, such as Avail has integrated with Optimism (OP Stack), Arbitrum, Polygon zkEVM, and ZK Sync, and is also working with non-EVM StarkWare, as well as integrating with Sovereign Labs and Stacker. You will find that all types of execution environments can run on Avail. We use the principles of zero-knowledge proof aggregation to connect these Rollups together, and the combination of data availability sampling is based on efficient proofs, enabling different types of Rollups to communicate with each other. Q4. Avail has been in development for a long time, what challenges have been encountered? How were these challenges overcome? Anurag Arjun: Avail is trying to meet the growing demands of the market in the past year or two. Ethereum is a very valuable chain, protecting at least hundreds of billions of dollars in value. Although Ethereum is still working on its own scalability roadmap, upgrades always take time. Rollup Stack has emerged crazily, in addition to Polygon, Arbitrum, ZkSync, StarkWare, Optimism, and other top Ethereum L2 Rollup.Stack, and about 5-10 other Rollup Stacks are also under development, and we are very actively involved in them. These Rollup Stacks are like SDKs, and in the future, there will be hundreds or even thousands of chains on each Rollup Stack. The Rollups hope that developers can accelerate the construction of application chains and that users can enjoy low fees. Therefore, our challenge is to meet market demand and reduce data availability costs as much as possible when Rollups need to scale. Additionally, users also need us to solve the problem of "fragmentation of experience". That's why Avail Nexus is so important. We will address this fundamental need in the next 6-12 months. Q 5. Next, let's talk about the issue of competitive comparison. Although I don't intend to name names, there are indeed some well-known competitors in terms of data availability (DA). Perhaps we are still in the early stages of DA development. How does Avail view its relationship with competitors in terms of cooperation or competition? Has the existence of competitors prompted Avail to adjust its strategy or goals? Anurag Arjun: Going back to the motivation for building Avail, it solves the associated problems brought by the core functionality upgrades of the Rollups, but as I mentioned, DA is just one component of it. Many competitors focus only on the DA component. Of course, many talented teams have done well in this aspect. Each team follows their own implementation approach. We have adopted a more proof-of-validity implementation approach and data availability sampling. Others have adopted more fraud-proof methods. I think fundamentally, scalable DA has already been addressed, and the DA component will become very standardized and commoditized, and it is a low-value area. We built our DA with proof-of-stake and data availability sampling because that's how we can enable Avail Nexus at the top. Without Avail's specific implementation, Avail Nexus would not be achievable. Only the DA aspect will become very commoditized. Therefore, while we certainly have comparable solutions, that is not where we believe the value lies. Our focus is on how to helpRollup extensions facilitate communication and connectivity, enhancing security.
Competition is a good thing as it motivates us to do more and strive harder. I value the work of all competitors and look forward to expanding the blockchain together.
Q 6. So, how does Avail plan to differentiate itself from competitors in the early stages?
Anurag Arjun: Essentially, our value proposition is that there will be many Rollups, and we will certainly be launching alongside other solutions.
The core question is, why are we building a "trinity"? It is to make this technology accessible to mainstream users. It wouldn't work if we presented all the complexity of Rollups and chains to mainstream users. Many talented teams are building the Rollup Stack. Each one of them will have their place, iterate on products, and we will interconnect them to provide users with a seamless experience. That's the main idea.
Q 7. What are Avail's future development plans? Are there any significant milestones or potential airdrops to look forward to?
Anurag Arjun: In terms of the timeline, Avail's DA release is expected in the first half of the year, which is very close now. The first version of Avail Nexus is projected to launch at the end of this year, while Avail Fusion Security is expected to be released next year. That's the product development timeline.
Currently, I don't want to comment on any specific airdrops, but there will definitely be ongoing community activities. Avail is a community project focused on building the entire Avail ecosystem. Therefore, we intend to develop this project together with our partners and the community.
Q 8. Finally, do you have any message for Chinese market developers and partners who want to join the Avail ecosystem?
Anurag Arjun: Blockchain practitioners have been continuously innovating. We have been exploring ways to build the next generation of blockchain, and Rollup is an innovative concept that has been underrated. When it was invented in 2019 and 2020, not many people knew about it, but now slowly, people are seeing many teams launching their own Rollups.
I believe that Rollup isIt must be specifically EVM Rollup, which can be used in any type of execution environment. We are particularly optimistic about Rollup for applications. This means that when developers build applications, they no longer just write smart contracts and build applications on top of them, but instead replace them with very lightweight chains. To give an analogy, it's like accessing applications on the internet today. For example, when you shop on Amazon or any other e-commerce website and want to pay the merchant, users think they are interacting with Amazon, but Amazon's architecture communicates with many participants in the backend. When you want to purchase something, Amazon sends a request to Visa's microservice or Stripe's microservice. When you send payment details, this information is verified and Visa responds whether the payment has been successfully completed. So what I'm trying to say is that Web2 applications are "efficient" - although there is a lot of complexity behind the scenes, users don't really feel that complexity. Internet applications use asynchronous network services. I believe that the next evolution of blockchain applications will be very similar to internet applications. There will be a series of complex operations happening in the backend, but users won't directly participate in them. Web3 will be a whole where many applications run in parallel and communicate asynchronously. The blockchain technology we are introducing will serve the next generation of Web3. Avail will take a leading role in this. The Chinese community has been very active in development and has had many innovations in the fintech field. Therefore, I think it is beneficial to participate in the Rollup technology field. This includes Avail's technological development. In the future, blockchain applications will be realized through Rollup and unified infrastructure.
