Avail Raises $27m to Accelerate the Unification of Web3

Today, Avail is announcing a $27 million seed round led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly, with participation from other notable VCs, including SevenX, Figment, Nomad Capital, and a number of angel investors. This round will help supercharge the development of Avail's Unification Layer - a three phase roadmap to unify ecosystems across the entirety of web3. 

Avail is laying a foundation for a fundamentally integrated blockchain future where separate ecosystems can implement their own technology and scaling solutions while remaining connected via a trust-minimized and secure coordination layer.

Read the deep dive into Avail's complete vision here.

The Rollup-Centric Future

The proliferation of rollups throughout the ecosystem has opened the door for a rollup-centric future, and that future is already here. Builders have access to multiple off-chain execution layers, rollup tooling is getting better and making development faster, and pretty soon deploying an app-specific blockchain will be as easy as deploying a smart contract today. The rapid development of multiple new app-specific and general purpose blockchains built with a modular stack is inevitable. 

In this new world where 100s and 1000s of chains coexist, it leads to the inescapable question of how to coordinate all of these amazing technologies together so end users can reap the rewards without the need to switch networks. This is why it’s imperative to lay the groundwork for the unified future today by building a unification framework that unites the ecosystem while fostering independence, enabling teams to pursue their own development paths.

Avail's Unification Layer

Avail DA is the first, and foundational component of the Unification Layer providing abundant blobspace for rollup builders and a base layer for a multitude of rollups to form a thriving ecosystem. Next comes Avail Nexus which will unify the ecosystem beyond the blockchains built on Avail’s DA layer and will use Avail DA as the root of trust for coordination across the ecosystem. Fusion Security will then provide additive security to a growing and connected ecosystem of rollups and blockchains that will contribute to Avail’s consensus.

Avail DA

Avail’s first component, Avail DA, is perfectly suited to solve rollup scalability by ensuring scalable and secure data availability blobspace. Since rollups constantly require access to large quantities of transaction data, this needs to be scaled hand-in-hand with execution.

To meet this demand, Avail DA provides a state-of-the-art modular DA layer built with validity proofs and data availability sampling (DAS). This provides not only a solid foundation for unification, but an important piece of core infrastructure for the rollup-centric future. The use of validity proofs in Avail’s construction is crucial. Avail’s use of validity proofs enables 10x faster guarantees on transaction finalization — this makes it possible to enable a significantly more responsive unified experience for end users.

Avail Nexus

The second component of the Unification Layer, Avail Nexus will act as the verification hub which unifies a wide array of rollups, both inside and outside the Avail ecosystem, utilizing Avail DA as the root of trust.

Avail Nexus is a zero-knowledge proof based coordination rollup on Avail DA that consists of a proof aggregation/verification layer and a sequencer selection mechanism that is made possible via embedding validity proof based Avail DAS (Data Availability Sampling) light clients and execution proof aggregation. The aggregated proof will also be subsequently sent to Ethereum.

Avail Fusion Security

Finally, to ensure a solid security foundation unites Avail’s infra-layer, Avail is building Fusion Security - the third part of the Unification Layer, which takes the native assets of the most mature ecosystems, including BTC, ETH, and others — allowing them to contribute additional security to the Avail ecosystem. This approach will progressively bolster Avail's cryptoeconomic security and marks one of the first instances where foreign tokens like ETH and BTC are utilized to power consensus on a different blockchain. Additionally, it enables new rollup tokens to play a role in securing the base layer that empowers them, adding to their utility. 

Ultimately, Avail stands to anchor the entire web3 ecosystem with a scalable, cutting edge data availability layer, harnessing validity proofs that leverage KZG Polynomial commitments to ensure immediate and reliable data availability, enabling rollups to grow, connect, stay secure, and adapt.

To learn more, read Avail’s vision for accelerating the unification of web3 and for more details about our upcoming mainnet release, go to mainnet.availproject.org