TurboDA: Lightning Fast With Native Token Payments

TL;DR

TurboDA enables applications using Avail DA to have instant response times.
Developers can pay to submit data to Avail using any ERC-20 token, such as ETH or USDC.
Integration is quick and easy with the TurboDA API.
To start using TurboDA today get in touch.

What Problem is TurboDA Solving?

Maintaining a responsive experience is critical to keeping users engaged in applications. Slow and laggy response times increase frustration among users and can reduce the perceived quality of apps. Due to the nature of blockchain systems, data must be propagated throughout a decentralized network, which introduces some unavoidable time delays when compared with a centralized server.

In today’s DA landscape, developers are faced with numerous choices. DA solutions provide confirmations at varying lengths, with trade-offs on finality times and other important attributes. For example, Avail produces blocks in ~20 seconds and data can be verified by light clients within 2 block times, or ~40 seconds from block inclusion. At this point, the data itself is finalized on the Avail Network and Avail’s full data availability guarantee applies. Celestia by comparison, produces blocks in ~6 secs and blocks are finalized instantly, however the data itself can not be provably verified by light clients for another ~10 minutes or longer. This is because Celestia uses an optimistic (fraud-proof) based construction, similar to an optimistic rollup. Avail avoids these wait times by using cryptographic validity proofs instead of fraud proofs, which is more similar to the way a ZK rollup operates. This makes the process around 15x faster on Avail.

Ethereum produces blocks in around 12 seconds but does not yet have light clients implemented which independently verify data availability like Avail and Celestia do - this is planned for implementation in the future with full Danksharding. Verification on Ethereum requires a wait time of around 15 minutes, this is the time it takes for block finalization. While each solution has different block times and wait times for DA finalization and verification, they are all significantly longer than the wait times end users of modern tech products are used to. Imagine waiting 40 secs, 10 mins or even 15 mins for a payment to go through at a shop, it would simply be unacceptable!

To solve this problem, pre-confirmations are issued, which provide the application with a promise that the transaction will be submitted to Avail DA in the future. The application can pass this promise on to end users or other applications, and determine how to move forward. With this pre-confirmation, the app may decide to allow follow-up transactions, or it may require the transaction to finalize on Avail DA first before progressing with any subsequent actions. Ultimately, how this is handled is up to the app developer and determined by the chain’s execution environment, as the transaction data being published to Avail is only getting published to the Avail blockchain and not being interpreted by Avail in any way.

What is TurboDA?

TurboDA is an implementation option that enables modular blockchain developers to receive near instant pre-confirmations when integrating with Avail DA. These pre-confirmations enable developers to deliver instant response times to end users, so the app feels highly responsive and users aren’t left waiting for transactions to finalize. This can be useful in Web3 gaming for example where fast pre-confirmations ensure smoother gameplay by reducing the time it takes for the app to respond to onchain actions like in-game purchases, NFT exchanges, or level progressions.

While TurboDA is used to improve the performance of applications for end users, it also offers developers simple integration options and predictable pricing. Data submissions can be paid at predictable rates using any ERC-20 token. TurboDA also accepts payments in Avail’s Native AVAIL token. The AVAIL token is still used however to pay for submitting data to the Avail Network, this process just happens in the background.

TurboDA has already begun making an impact among integration partners, with interest from high-throughput chains like Rooch Network. Haichao Zhu, Co-founder of Bitcoin application layer Rooch Network, shared: "TurboDA is very imaginative, it's not just an upload relay that simply supports multi-gas payments. It can also take full advantage of its asynchronous capabilities to better optimize the timing of uploads, allowing for smoother throughput while also reducing gas overheads."

Near-Instant Transactions

TurboDA issues immediate pre-confirmations in ~250ms before data is published to Avail DA. These pre-confirmations can be used within an app, and by other users to confirm what the data contains, or retrieve a full copy of it and check if it has been published to Avail’s blockchain.

Data posted to TurboDA is sent to the Avail blockchain and finalized within ~2 blocks after block inclusion. Although this is already the fastest on Avail vs other providers, applications with high throughput execution environments or those competing in markets like SocialFi and GameFi have users with zero tolerance for delays.

Cheaper & Faster Integrations

Implementing TurboDA is straightforward via the TurboDA API. It includes robust error handling and RPC fallbacks out of the box, and can even sustain sudden power outages without data loss. Once data is submitted to TurboDA and a pre-confirmation is received, it can be relied upon to relay the published data to the Avail Network. This means that application developers can progress through the next phase of an app experience (like completing a payment flow, an in-game swap or applying an NFT to a user’s profile).

With all the error handling and retry logic written into TurboDA, app developers can get up and running much faster without having to write all of this and handle all the potential fallbacks themselves. It’s already taken care of by TurboDA, allowing app developers to get up and running much faster.

Native Token Payments

Paying to post data to TurboDA can be done with predictable pricing by purchasing data credits in advance, just like pre-purchasing data credits for your mobile. These data credits are purchased with any ERC-20 token, or the AVAIL token, and consumed as data is posted. While it’s possible to support any ERC-20, only whitelisted tokens will be accepted. To have your token added to the list, please get in touch.

By using TurboDA’s data credits, developers have a simple and predictable way to pay for DA fees using their native token. This can help improve budget management and forecasting, it also contributes to the utility of native tokens by using them to pay for DA.