Translated by: Lu Jiangfei
Translated by: Lu Jiangfei
Recently, Polygon announced the launch of a new data availability layer called "Avail", and this technology has quickly attracted a lot of attention in the crypto community.
The data availability layer technology first came from a project called "Celestia" (formerly LazyLedger), but because the technology is slightly complicated, most people don't want to spend too much time understanding it. In this article, I try to explain in simple language the relevant content of the "data availability infrastructure" and why this architecture is used.
First, let's explore the data availability issue. Data availability issues arise when a block producer publishes a valid block header but deliberately obscures the underlying transaction data. This problem arises mainly because light nodes rely only on block headers for validation, so they can be easily tricked into accepting invalid blocks.
Full nodes cannot generate data availability proofs for light nodes because blocks are missing data. Likewise, full nodes cannot generate fraud proofs for invalid blocks, which means that light nodes have to verify data availability themselves, or assume that most data is honest and trustworthy.
So, that's why most nodes have to download full transaction data and verify block data availability. Doing so, however, introduces scalability constraints and problems to network extension solutions. For example, as verification complexity increases, sharding, Rollups, and block sizes all increase.
So, how do Avail and Celestia solve this problem? In effect, they built a blockchain where on-chain consensus is only used to verify transaction ordering and data availability, no transaction execution/validation is required.
consensus layer
executive layer
consensus layer
data availability layer
For a blockchain like Ethereum, which is used by most people, all three layers are coupled in an overall architecture - the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is part of the consensus rules and protocol. And projects such as Celestia and Avail actually provide a "separate" data availability layer and a consensus layer, so that other different blockchain/transaction execution environments can benefit from it.
Celestia and Avail can be used as a minimal, pluggable consensus layer and data availability layer, only verifying data availability and transaction ordering, which provides greater flexibility to the blockchain network modular architecture.
Not only that, but "separating" the data availability layer and the consensus layer can make it more scalable, because they use mathematical data availability proofs (mathematical data availability proofs) to perform DA checks very efficiently. (Note: Celestia uses erasure coding, and Avail uses KZG commitment scheme)
In this way, the execution consensus bottleneck problem can be effectively solved, because only the data availability proof needs to be executed in the data availability layer, and there is no need to verify the status and validity of the block through execution.
More importantly, being a "separate" layer means that the execution environment is "sovereign independent", Celestia and Avail are "pluggable" in terms of application-specific blockchains, without the need to bootstrap their own The validator set/consensus then benefits from its security.
That is, these blockchains not only allow for easier network scaling, but also gain the security of Celestia/Avail (data availability layer and consensus layer).
However, since the data availability layer and consensus layer do not verify transaction validity, "execution" must be performed somehow to handle transaction execution and verification/dispute resolution. Celestia proposed Optimistic Rollups as a solution, while proposing to add Rollup support to the Cosmos SDK. Essentially, this solution builds an execution layer on top of the data availability and consensus layers.
On the whole, the "data availability layer and consensus layer" environment is very similar to the future scenario to be constructed by ETH 2.0. For example, Vitalik Buterin wrote in the Rollup-centric Ethereum roadmap: "Everyone can handle a single high-security execution shard, and a scalable data availability layer."
If Polygon's new tools can build a reliable execution layer and a stable and convenient execution layer on top of off-chain scaling solutions, then this scalable data availability layer technology seems very promising.
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