Raises $27M to unveil Avail's data availability vision

php Editor Strawberry reports: Avail recently received $27 million in financing, demonstrating their vision for data availability. This company focuses on helping enterprises visualize and manage data, providing simpler and more efficient data usage and analysis tools. Their vision is to create an open, easy-to-use data platform that makes it easier for users to leverage data for decision-making and innovation. This financing will provide Avail with more resources and support for its development, and is expected to drive them to greater breakthroughs in the data field.

Written by angelilu, Foresight News

##Polygon blockchain project Avail announced today (February 26) Successfully completed a $27 million seed round led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly. The funding will be used primarily to develop three core products: Data Availability Solutions (DA), Nexus and Fusion.

Polygon was founded by three co-founders in 2017, but in March this year, one of the co-founders, Anurag Arjun, announced his resignation and said he would focus on another new project.

That new project is Avail. Polygon is like a huge Layer2 aggregator. Over the years, its team has explored various expansion directions internally. In 2020, it launched internal research on the modular blockchain project Avail. According to research, perhaps Polygon wants to focus on its own development, or perhaps Avail has enough potential. Since March this year, Avail has been separated from Polygon and operated as an independent entity.

Since the spin-off, Avail launched a three-month Kate test network in June, launched the "Data Proof Bridge", and cooperated with Equilibrium Group to open source the Optimism EVM (OpEVM) software development toolkit (SDK) new prototype, Avail said that the Kate testnet is expected to end in October. The next most important development is the launch of the incentivized testnet, and the mainnet is expected to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2023 or the first quarter of 2024.

The difference between Avail and a single blockchain

So what is Avail that made Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun choose to "go out and work alone"? And what is its use?

Ultimately, Avail aims to solve the scaling problem of a single blockchain like Ethereum. It might have originally been called an L3 or off-chain scaling solution, but now Avail has found a more appropriate 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 performed by A single system is completed independently, so the expansion performance 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 focusing on the data availability layer

And Avail is a provider that only focuses on the data availability layer (Data Availability Layer).

Avail can efficiently sort and record transactions, provide data storage and verification of data feasibility, support blockchains compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and allow Rollup to publish data directly to Avail, and its light client network verification mechanism (described below) allows Rollup on Avail to verify status through the light client network without relying on smart contracts and base layers. And because of its modular nature, developers can store data in Avail and choose other networks for settlement.

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 usable blockchain from the ground up. As an expanded data availability solution, the design of Avail will be analyzed below from several aspects such as consensus mechanism, decentralization, and validity proof.

Consensus Mechanism

Different blockchains will choose different security mechanisms according to their needs after balancing activity and security. Avail chooses the "golden mean" and uses BABE and GRANDPA inherited from Polkadot SDK Consensus mechanism, BABE acts as a block production engine and prioritizes liveness by coordinating with validating nodes to identify new block producers. GRANDPA acts as a finality gadget that can simultaneously finalize all blocks leading to a specific block once more than two-thirds of the validators have attested to the chain containing that block. This hybrid mechanism provides Avail with network resiliency, making it Ability to withstand temporary network partitions and massive node failures.

Decentralization

In terms of decentralization, Avail uses Polkadot's Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS), supporting up to 1,000 verification nodes. NPoS also has effective reward distribution that can reduce equity. Risks of centralization.

In addition, Avail's node function settings provide it with a unique fail-safe mechanism. The network architecture of a single blockchain consists of verification nodes, full nodes and light clients. These three can be regarded as playing the roles of craftsmen, quality inspectors and consumers respectively. Avail gives the quality inspector rights of full nodes to When it comes to light clients, light clients are verified using the Data Availability Sampling (DAS) method, which is a process used by light clients to request small, random portions of each block, capable of achieving the same security guarantees as traditional full nodes. . In Avail's design, full nodes still exist but they are treated almost as backup tools to maintain high redundancy of data on the network. This design allows Avail to avoid relying on full nodes to obtain data when the network is interrupted or bottlenecked, thus preventing full nodes from being Risk of Collusion.

Effectiveness Proof

When it comes to modularity, we have to mention Celestia, which has recently become popular due to the launch of tokens. There was also a small oolong between Avail and Celestia. When Polygon first deployed Avail in June 2021, Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam posted that Avail’s introduction almost copied verbatim the blog he wrote in 2019 to introduce Celestia. Plagiarism aside, more teams are welcome to join. Data availability areas. In response, Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic said he apologized to Celestia and its community due to mistakes made by the marketing and content teams.

Although the two have many similarities at the level of data availability, Avail and Celestia differ in validity proof. Avail uses KZG polynomial commitments (KZG commitments), which can reduce memory, bandwidth and storage requirements and provide Simplicity, KZG promises to speed up the verification process on Avail in combination with the Avail light client. Celestia uses fraud proof technology, which is much faster than KZG commitment generation. However, due to the large scale of its sampled data, the communication bandwidth required is slightly higher.

Avail's KZG polynomial commitment refers to the commitment generated by the block producer when producing the block, summarizing the data in the entire row of the Avail block, and viewing the commitment in the block header by the light client during the verification phase , and verifying the proof of each unit according to the commitment can confirm the availability of all data in the block, thereby improving the data throughput on the chain and solving performance bottlenecks.

Summary

Although Avail is still some time away from the mainnet launch, as a modular data availability solution, it provides new opportunities for the development of blockchain technology. Think and explore directions. Currently, more and more industry players are facing the challenge of costly growth due to limited block space. This challenge will become more and more severe in the future. A scalable data availability layer is crucial to effectively expand the blockchain. Development Where people choose to build projects will also determine whether they have a competitive advantage in the years to come.

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