Road to Mainnet: January 2024

Introduction

As we gear up to Mainnet, we’ll be focusing on the progress and projects along the way from the Avail team. January saw our testnet process almost 100M events in just 3 days, we introduced partner challenges in our Clash of Nodes Incentivized Testnet, and dropped 3 new whiteboard episodes, so let’s get to it!

Highlights

• Officially closed the Kate Testnet (see you over on the Goldberg Testnet!)
• Announced our integration with Spheron
• Launched our integration with ZKCross 
• The Avail testnet processed about 100 million events in just 3 days from activity from blobscriptions users.
• Launched two partner challenges in Clash of Nodes, with Dymension and Karnot 
• We’re now on Telegram and have 2.8k members
• Increased validators on the Goldberg Testnet to 300
  

Technical Update

• Overall, most of the team’s efforts are prepping for the finalization of the testing on Goldberg Testnet. While feature-wise, we are complete on the node and light client side, we are performing optimizations and fixes. 
• Node and integration audits are ongoing. On the node side, we are finalizing the fixes we have from the findings. 
• We are performing a lot of performance testing and work for optimization of the p2p side of the light client network and redeploying new set-ups on a daily basis. This will allow us to optimize our side of the light client network for the best performance of the network.

 Network Update

• Increased validators on the Goldberg Testnet to 300.
• Preparations for Mainnet are in full swing. With networks to mimic the Mainnet being spun up and run. 
• We have concluded the Kate testnet as the focus has fully shifted to Goldberg and finalizations of Mainnet.
• In anticipation for Mainnet, we are working a wind down process for Goldberg. We will share more information on this in the near future. 
• The team is building a simple script to increase the stake seamlessly across the network, testing first on devnet, testnet and eventually ready for mainnet.

Blog Posts

Data Availability: What Is It?
Avail’s Core Features Explained
Learnings From the Clash of Nodes Incentivized Testnet

Whiteboard Series

Polygon Miden: A New VM for the ZK Future 
Cartesi: A Rollup (and CPU) for Every dApp Developer
Paima Studios: Building Games & Tools for Game Builders

Podcasts

Zero Knowledge: Avail’s Approach to DA with Prabal Banerjee
The Rollup: Why Data Availability Is The Missing Piece To The Modular Scaling Puzzle

Clash of Nodes Update

Avail's Clash of Nodes incentivized testnet continued this month with new challenges, including two partner challenges with Dymension and Karnot. The incentivized testnet now has rapidly expanded with 300 validators, 90k accounts, and 6M transactions. We saw 20+GB in monthly data volume (almost 2x the monthly DA needs of every Eth L2 combined). We saw great interest in the light client form, with 38k responses, and will have more on that very soon!

Our Favorite Tweets

Next Month

🚀 Get ready for the latest edition of Avail’s Hot Take Series: The Execution Race, coming to a stage during ETH Denver! On February 26, we’ll be bringing different teams building and working with various blockchain execution environments together to exchange hot takes and showcase what their building. The event will also host discussions on alt-VMs and Appchain frameworks to provide a complete picture of the execution layer ecosystem.

Avail is a partner for ETHGlobal’s Circuit Breaker hackathon starting on Feb 1. Stay tuned as we check in with teams building on Avail. For more info on the hackathon and prizes see our blog post. 

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