With the skyrocketing of Celestia, modular blockchains have recently received great attention, highlighting the importance of data availability layer in reducing costs and scaling Ethereum-like blockchains. Currently, Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail are the most notable projects, and who will be the ultimate winner? This article is sourced from Bridget Harris and is compiled, organized, and written by Block Beats.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction to Data Availability Sampling (DAS)
2. Battle of Avail, EigenDA, and Celestia in the DA ecosystem
3. Perspectives from project teams
The data availability layer (DA) has become an integral part of modular architectures, serving as a plug-in component to reduce costs and expand the scalability of layer 2 blockchains (DA’s core function is to ensure that data on the chain is available to all network participants for use and access).
Historically, each node had to download all transaction data to verify data availability, which was an inefficient and costly task. However, this is how most blockchains currently operate and is a barrier to scalable layer 2 solutions, as the amount of data required for verification increases linearly with block size.
End users suffer from this: data availability costs account for 90% of the transaction costs generated by users on Rollup (currently, the cost of sending transaction data to Ethereum is $1,300-1,600/mb).
The introduction of Data Availability Sampling (DAS) fundamentally changes this architecture. With DAS, light nodes can confirm data availability through multi-round random sampling of block data without having to download every entire block.
Once the multi-round sampling is completed and a certain confidence threshold of data availability is reached, the rest of the transaction process can proceed safely. This way, the chain can scale its block size while maintaining simple data availability verification. Furthermore, significant cost savings can be achieved: these emerging layers can reduce DA costs by up to 99%.
A very appropriate analogy of DA in 0xngmi
In addition to achieving higher throughput, the data availability layer is also meaningful for improving interoperability. Cheap DAs will inevitably drive the explosion of new custom Rollup chains, making deployments increasingly easy through Rollup-as-a-service providers like Caldera, AltLayer, and Conduit.
However, with the emergence of L2 and L3 ecosystems, they are expected to become fragmented. It is already difficult for users to adopt new platforms – if interoperability, liquidity, and network effects are limited, the situation will worsen. A unified DA layer as the foundation of each network would make capital flows simpler and attract a broader user base.
Caldera and other RaaS providers will allow projects to choose the DA layer when building custom aggregations
Avail, EigenDA, and Celestia are the protagonists in the DA ecosystem – each serving the same space but taking slightly different approaches in terms of infrastructure stack, execution, and listing.
In terms of technical architecture, Avail, Ethereum, and EigenDA adopt KZG commitments, while Celestia adopts fraud proofs to verify block encoding correctness. Generating KZG proofs, although a very strict method for data availability, brings more computational overhead to block producers, especially when block size increases. On the other hand, Celestia assumes data can be implicitly obtained through its fraud-proof scheme.
As an unfinished computation “work”, the system has to wait for a period of time to enter the fraud proof dispute period before nodes can confirm the accurate encoding of the block. KZG proofs and fraud proofs have undergone rapid technological advances, and their trade-offs may become more complex, and it is currently unclear which mechanism will be strictly superior to the other.
For Avail, they adopt a KZG commitment architecture, making it well-suited for zk structures. If zk dominates in the future and Celestia relies on optimistic fraud proofs, this may pose a challenge to Celestia. Additionally, even if all full nodes crash, Avail’s P2P light client network can still support the network, while in Celestia’s architecture, light clients cannot operate without full nodes. Avail and Celestia both use erasure coding under DAS (Distributed Storage) to fragment and increase redundancy in data, allowing for data reconstruction for verification.
Compared to Celestia and Avail’s technical stacks, EigenDA leverages existing Ethereum infrastructure to the fullest. If data needs to be sent to Rollup contracts to prove its availability, EigenDA will inherit the same finality time as Ethereum. Full adoption of EigenLayer in Rollup will enable faster finality.
To achieve consensus, Avail adopts BABE + GRANDPA inherited from Polkadot’s SDK, along with NPoS for nomination-based proof-of-stake. NPoS is used to nominate a set of validators that delegators wish to see elected, while BABE determines who proposes the next block, and GRANDPA serves as the finality algorithm.
Celestia uses Tendermint as the consensus mechanism, allowing users to stake their TIA for validator staking rewards. Although Celestia achieves fast finality through Tendermint, there is an assurance waiting period for actual data availability (users need time to submit fraud proofs).
EigenDA itself does not have consensus but has two mechanisms to ensure data availability effectiveness:
– Proof of custody: This is essentially an economic security mechanism that ensures nodes store data but does not guarantee that the data is provided to everyone in the network. If nodes do not comply, they will be slashed, for example, if they fail to prove ownership of the data.
– Sufficient decentralization: Ensuring the operator set remains decentralized and resistant to collusion is crucial for the normal operation of the network. Having a large and independent set of validators makes data provisioning a competition, attracting many market participants. At this scale, colluding becomes extremely difficult.
One interesting point worth mentioning is that Celestia’s active validator set is composed of the top 100 validators with the most token staked, and this threshold may be lowered in the future. Additionally, each of their validators stores the entire dataset.
EigenDA optimizes each node (potentially millions) to store a small portion of the data, so if enough nodes are honest, the data can be reconstructed. The complete origin of EigenDA (and more details) can be found in Sreeram’s recent post.
Finally, Avail provides a useful comparison of the core components of major DA layers.
New discussions have emerged regarding the trade-offs of each design. David Hoffman points out that Celestia is a complete blockchain in itself, a complex stack that requires more than just pure DA. On the other hand, EigenDA is just a set of smart contracts, but it relies on Ethereum, while Celestia and Avail do not.
Celestia’s team believes that tokens are necessary for security, and EigenDA will eventually need tokens as it is impossible to reduce the availability of on-chain data. They believe that to ensure nodes are honest, data is available, and malicious nodes are punished, the network must be able to verify through incentive structures, including native tokens. Nick White of Celestia raises criticism of EigenDA in this regard.
From a branding perspective, EigenDA is a product that is highly consistent with Ethereum. The EigenLayer team is building it based on EIP-4844 and danksharding – as Sreeram puts it, EigenDA is being built as a “uniquely ETH-centric data availability layer.” He explains that by definition, a data availability layer is a modular product, but other DA “layers” are actually blockchains themselves.
Packaging the DA layer into the blockchain does bring significant benefits to Rollups running natively on it, primarily in the form of security guarantees. However, Sreeram mentions that the goal of their team building EigenDA is to create a product that provides data availability services to the Ethereum ecosystem from first principles – a true “Layer” adjacent to the Ethereum ecosystem. He points out that separate consensus is not needed here as Ethereum-based Rollups already rely on the network for ordering and consensus (Sreeram explains this in a recent Bankless program).
Avail adopts a construction of validity proofs and DAS, achieving a high level of flexibility and interoperability in the ecosystem. Their architecture lays the foundation for a scalable framework that supports services across many different platforms. This “agnostic” standpoint allows for greater interoperability and capital flow and also attracts non-Ethereum-centric ecosystems.
The ultimate goal here is to obtain ordered transaction data from all chains and aggregate them into Avail, making it the coordinating hub for all of Web3. To kickstart the network, Avail recently launched a node clash activity on its incentive testnet, allowing users to run validators and light clients and participate in network challenges.
Celestia’s ecosystem consists of RaaS providers, shared sequencers, cross-chain infrastructure, and more, covering ecosystems like Ethereum, Ethereum rollups, Cosmos, and Osmosis.
Each of these design choices, both technically and in terms of marketing, comes with interesting trade-offs. Personally, I am unsure whether the data availability category will be a winner-takes-all or commoditized market – instead, there may exist an oligopoly market where projects choose the DA layer that best suits their needs.
Depending on the type of protocol, teams can optimize for interoperability, security, or preferences for a specific ecosystem or community. If custom use cases for aggregations are expected to explode, they will not hesitate to integrate the DA layer, and there will be more than one powerful option to choose from.
This technology – and the overall modular narrative – is still relatively new, with Celestia just recently going live, and Avail and EigenDA set to launch on the mainnet in the coming months.
However, the progress of modularism in technology so far has been remarkable (many of these concepts were just ideas a few years ago!). By fundamentally improving how we build and use blockchains, the DA layer will undoubtedly become one of the core technologies in this cycle and future cycles.
Related Reports
Celestia vs. Cosmos: A comparison of core architectures, application scenarios, and token value
How important is “data availability” to Layer 2 and inseparable from Ethereum mainnet?
Monolithic Chains vs. Modular Blockchains: The next step in the competition among Ethereum, Solana, and Celestia