Avail has raised a total of $75 million. Overview of the Web3 unified layer it is building

Written by; 0xjs@黄金财经

On June 4, 2024, the modular blockchain project Avail announced that it had raised $43 million in a Series A round led by Founders Fund, Dragonfly and Cyber ​​Fund.

The new round of financing will be used to build Avail's Unification Layer, which combines data availability, cross-chain coordination and shared security to enable modular blockchains to scale and interoperate in a permissionless and secure manner.

On March 25, 2024, Avail announced that it had raised $27 million in seed round funds, also led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly.

Together with Avail's initial $5 million pre-seed round of financing, Avail has currently raised a total of $75 million. Other investors include SevenX, Figment, Nomad Capital, LocalGlobe, Altos Ventures, Chapter One, Superscrypt, Foresight Ventures, Mirana Ventures, KR1, RW3 Ventures, Alliance DAO, Hashkey, Elixir Capital, Spark Digital Capital and some angel investors.

Avail was originally an initiative within Polygon Labs, spun off from Polygon in March 2023, and has now grown into a full-fledged independent entity led by former Polygon founder Anurag Arjun and research director Prabal Banerjee. Avail takes a unique approach to solving the problems facing Rollup scalability, interoperability, and security, leveraging years of experience building blockchain infrastructure and adopting cutting-edge ZK technology.

“We need a way for rollups to scale and aggregate together permissionlessly so that cross-rollup transactions can be seamlessly connected.” - Anurag Arjun, founder of Avail

“We need to accept the fact that many ecosystems will coexist and they will need to communicate with each other. We can solve this problem from first principles and build a more cohesive solution for developers and users.” - Prabal Banerjee, founder of Avail

Overview of Avail’s Web3 Unification Layer

Avail’s Unification Layer Layer ) consists of three core modules, namely Avail DA, Avail Nexus and Avail Fusion. Avail DA solves the data availability problem, Avail Nexus solves the cross-chain coordination problem, and Avail Fusion solves the shared security problem.

Data Avail DA Module:While the crypto industry has taken many approaches to scaling DA, Avail's approach is unique, laying the foundation for broader blockchain interoperability through proof of validity and data availability sampling (DAS). This allows anyone to verify DA guarantees in less than a minute without relying on a full node.

Cross-chain Coordination Module Avail Nexus:Building on the unique features of Avail DA, a cross-chain coordination center is formed to connect users and liquidity in an unprecedented way.  Avail Nexus acts as the verification center for Unification Rollup, using Avail DA as the root of trust.  Avail Nexus is a custom ZK-coordinated Rollup based on Avail, including: proof aggregation and verification layer, sorter selection/slot auction mechanism, Nexus also regularly submits Rollup proofs to Ethereum and Avail DA layer for verification. Custom modules in Avail DA verify Rollup proofs.

Shared Security Module Avail Fusion: To provide extremely strong cryptoeconomic security to the Unification Center, Avail is building a solution to further unify the blockchain ecosystem. By expanding the re-pledged assets to include multiple assets such as ETH, BTC, etc., Avail is laying the foundation for an innovative shared security layer. Rollups built with Avail will benefit from the additional cryptoeconomic security of Avail Fusion, a shared security layer protected by a basket of crypto assets.  

Every part of the Avail Unification Layer is designed to enhance the experience of blockchain developers and users around the world. Developers are free to choose any technology they like and can build a custom blockchain based on their specific use cases. They can inherit all the core features of Avail DA with just a few lines of code. On the other hand, blockchain users can experience bridge-free transactions because the complexity of transferring assets across chains is managed by Nexus.  

Avail said that with the completion of the Series A financing and the announcement of the Avail Unification Drop airdrop, the next major milestone is to launch Avail DA on the mainnet.