How Polygon Avail Unlocks the Future of Modular Blockchains

Source: Polygon Blog

Compiled by: Hu Tao, Chain Catcher

Blockchain architecture needs to keep pace with the times. Whether people are coordinating in DAOs, executing complex contracts in DeFi, or investing in games through GameFi, the demand for monolithic blockchains is growing exponentially today.

The challenge is scalability.

Monolithic chains are feeling the side effects of their success: block space is coveted and expensive, and without powerful machines, it is difficult to participate in the chain, which reduces decentralization and security. This is known as the scalability trilemma.

Fortunately, there is a way to address this issue: modularity. Modular blockchain architecture allocates the key functions of a blockchain to separate layers that work together to improve scalability while maintaining decentralization and security.

This is why Polygon has been building a suite of modular scaling solutions to support chains and applications of any scale. Today, we will share our vision for Polygon Avail, a new data availability blockchain that has significant advantages in scalability and improves the Web3 experience for users, application creators, and blockchain builders alike. This is the first article in a series covering the vision, architecture, and use of Polygon Avail, so let’s dive in:

Avail: A Data Availability-Centric Blockchain

At its core, Avail is a blockchain that records blockchain transactions and proves data availability. It focuses on data availability and ordering, representing a key component of Polygon's modular chain design vision.

For some background, blockchains perform several key functions, including ensuring that transactions are valid (e.g., not fraudulent and representing the correct state transitions) and reaching consensus on the set of transactions and their order within each block. Monolithic blockchains tightly couple these functions, leading to limitations in their scalability.

Avail proposes a novel architecture that provides a fundamental consensus layer that only reaches consensus on what the transaction data is and how it is ordered, completely decoupling it from validity issues. This ensures that Avail is very fast, scalable, and flexible enough to allow any type of chain with any execution environment to be built on top of it.

As an analogy, think of old media formats where media and its use were closely related. For example, a vinyl record player plays music encoded on each record, while a VHS player plays video encoded on each tape. Each ecosystem is built on assumptions about the data encoded in each medium.

In contrast, hard drives encode data as abstract 1s and 0s, with no inherent additional meaning—software can read that data to apply it to various uses. This separation of the data layer from applications allows for massive scalability and flexibility.

Similarly, Avail has evolved to scale blockchain applications, but it is not a file storage solution—it is a layer that records blockchain transactions and proves their data availability, allowing multiple execution environments to be built on top of it.

Avail's modular approach provides us with a way to solve the scalability trilemma: blockchains can increase scalability without sacrificing security or decentralization by increasing node computational requirements.

What are the Benefits of Avail?

Avail's radical approach to data availability yields three main benefits:

First, we can make this data availability consensus layer more scalable at scale. Avail guarantees that data can be obtained through validity proofs using erasure coding and Kate polynomial commitments, without the need for fraud proofs. This means that only a very small random sample of the total data needs to be downloaded to determine availability, effectively solving the data availability problem.

Second, we enable light clients to operate with a security level comparable to full nodes, as light clients can determine data availability without trusting a majority of honest nodes.

Finally, since the data consensus layer does not know what the transactions represent, it can represent any transaction together on the same layer. We can multiplex the Avail chain, making it flexible enough to accommodate transactions from multiple independent, sovereign chains that only share Avail's consensus and data availability features. Each chain can implement and fully own its own execution environment. The Three Major Advantages of Avail

For a deeper understanding of how Avail works internally, including the application of erasure coding and KZG commitments, please refer to our Introducing Avail blog post.

Who Will Benefit from Avail?

With Avail, anyone building a new blockchain can outsource its consensus layer while still retaining full control over their chain: they can fork, upgrade, or change their chain at will.

The more clients that use Avail, the more data it can save and keep available, making the system more secure. Users running light clients benefit from the same level of security as those running full nodes, paving the way for true decentralization.

What about teams looking to try new execution environments? Each chain built on Avail can implement its own execution environment—EVM, WASM, or even new environments that do not yet exist. They can start using it without launching a separate consensus layer or bringing a new validator set online.

But Avail is not just beneficial for new public chains. By helping them implement effective solutions to reduce the data published to Ethereum, it can also significantly improve the performance of existing Rollups. This, in turn, will lead to better (cheaper!) and more stable transaction prices.

What Will This Lead To?

Avail is a step towards one of the earliest dreams of Web3 (and Polygon's early slogan): the blockchain internet.

Imagine a future where teams can easily build custom chains with the click of a button and inherit the security of a vast network from the start.

In the future, applications can implement custom runtimes that execute entirely on their intended clients without wasting resources around the world. Chains can easily bridge between each other without trusting a majority of honest nodes. Blockchain applications can run on smartphones without intermediaries and with security levels comparable to running full nodes. Avail will make this possible.

Avail is a key step towards a modular future, where even the hierarchy of Layer 1 and Layer 2 will break down, and chains will work together to solve critical issues, all executed in the name of decentralized execution across applications, from gaming to governance to DeFi and beyond.

When Will Avail Launch?

We are excited to share the vision for Avail and announce that the Avail testnet will launch in Q2. In the coming weeks, we will share more educational content and technical deep dives, and we look forward to you trying it out on the testnet. A final teaser: we are working closely with the Polygon Hermez team to develop something cool. Stay tuned.

If you want to learn more about how to use Avail to optimize Rollups or applications, or if you just want to ask us directly, we would love to hear from you. Check out our repository, join our Discord server, or send us an email.

Let’s bring the world to Ethereum!