Polygon is launching an entirely new blockchain, Avail, focused on ‘data availability.’ Covered: Splitting Up The Chain What Does ‘Avail’ Do? Splitting Up The Chain Scalability is an issue that has plagued blockchains since the very beginning. The more chains wish to scale and become faster and efficient, the more they must give up the […] The post Polygon Launches New Blockchain Tackling Data Availability appeared first on CryptosRus.

Polygon Launches New Blockchain Tackling Data Availability

Polygon is launching an entirely new blockchain, Avail, focused on ‘data availability.’

Covered:

  • Splitting Up The Chain
  • What Does ‘Avail’ Do?

Splitting Up The Chain

Scalability is an issue that has plagued blockchains since the very beginning. The more chains wish to scale and become faster and efficient, the more they must give up the properties of security and decentralization. This is known as the blockchain trilemma. Rhe team at Polygon is creating ‘Polygon Avail’, a new blockchain aimed at using modularity to solve this problem, i.e. splitting up the chain into different layers. A similar concept is what ETH 2.0 is meant to accomplish with data sharding.

In essence, modularity “distributes the key functionality of blockchains into separate layers.” Generally, there are three layers in this modular system. The settlement layer, the execution layer, and the availability layer. Splitting up the chain allows for flexibility between these different processes, as opposed to what Polygon calls “monolithic chains” that execute all of these processes together. Mainly, its about space and data, and splitting those two.

This idea of a ‘data availability blockchain’, as they are calling it, is something that crypto experts like Arcane Research’s Eric Wall predicted would become popular at the beginning of this year. As he noted in his 2022 predictions: “Data Availability (DA) will be the big theme in 2022. Chains that specialize in DA will get traction. Some roll-ups will choose to bridge to ethereum, but use other solutions as the DA layer.”

It appears Polygon is keenly listening to Mr. Wall. Polygon has been pushing strongly towards scaling in the last year. As you can see below, Polygon has either acquired, developed, or is building 6 different ethereum scaling solutions; all of which apparently live on or adjacent to the Polygon main chain.

What Does ‘Avail’ Do?

In terms of the new Avail chain, Polygon lists three key benefits. Number one, making the data availability consensus layer “massively more scalable.” Number two, enabling light clients to basically act as full nodes and thus inherit the security of full nodes. Number three, increase flexibility by allowing different chains to execute on the Avail chain. All of this seems a bit in the weeds, and it certainly is. The idea is simply for chains to be able to delegate the responsibility of data availability and ordering to Avail.

The team at Polygon said Avail will also act as a “data availability layer” for Ethereum’s Layer-2 solutions, such as Optimism and other zero-knowledge solutions offered by Polygon, to help solve their data requirements. Essentially, other blockchains or Layer-2’s will be able to offload some of the data stress to the Avail chain. This will mitigate the problem of more data requiring more hardware and RAM for the nodes.

While this may not sound sexy, as mentioned above, crypto experts have mentioned that Data Availability is something you will hear a lot of more going forward. It may take some time to sink in. To learn more about DA, see this video from Vitalik explaining why it is a problem, all the way back in 2017.

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