Meet Prabal Banerjee: Avail’s New Co-Founder

Hi everyone, Prabal here.

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Avail as a co-founder, alongside Anurag Arjun. We have been discussing and working on the data availability problem since 2020. As Avail takes its first steps as an independent entity, I am thrilled to continue our journey towards solving this challenge. Avail’s mission is to offer a robust data availability platform that enables developers create next generation of trustless applications. I hope to play my role in the journey by leading the research and engineering wings of Avail.

My introduction to cryptography dates back to 2013 when I worked on several projects involving symmetric key cryptography. Following academic training in theoretical computer science, I joined the Ph.D. program in 2016, where I was introduced to blockchain systems and immediately captivated by their potential. Over the course of four years, I delved into various research problems, including blockchain-based data exchange and proofs of retrievability, among others.

In 2020, I joined Polygon (then Matic Network) as a researcher. Every day of the next two and a half years has been a learning experience. I got to work with many extremely talented individuals who helped shape my understanding of the challenges of a blockchain in production, and also about how to keep up with this rapidly evolving field. Apart from contributing to improvement and scaling efforts within Polygon, my major focus had been Avail, where we started from reading research papers and designing a DA focused chain to launching our testnet last year. So when the time came, it only made sense for me to continue to help the Avail team grow and fulfill our original mission.

Through Avail, we want to fundamentally change the developer experience of creating blockchain applications by allowing them to focus on the business logic in order to break free of the niche. We want to push for modular chains, where Avail acts as the base security layer providing a robust DA API. This gives chain developers a big design space to build innovative applications that scale trust.

I’m thrilled to join the amazing Avail team, who are the protagonists of the Avail story till now. We have big plans and exciting developments and improvements, and we hope to share more with you in the near future. Thank you for your support and looking forward to more interactions through Twitter or LinkedIn.