Welcome adventurer,
The Avail Explorations team is inviting you to join them in contributing to the open-source, modular future that will be built upon Avail’s data availability layer. The explorations team has recently emerged from the shadows after being in stealth mode for the past few months. They have been busy exploring different aspects of the modular blockchain space and building integrations with other popular ecosystems.
Avail Uncharted is a new initiative launched by the Avail Explorations team to collaborate with the community on foundational and exploratory projects. The Explorations team, a small group of developers at Avail, has already begun building key open-source infrastructure and now they are opening the doors so you can get involved too.
The Explorations team is actively working on a number of projects. You can see the current projects in the Avail Uncharted Repo and here’s a quick summary of each project and your starting point for exploring Avail’s uncharted horizons.
OpEVM
OpEVM is an EVM-compatible sovereign optimistic rollup SDK with working fraud proofs and has support for a decentralized sequencer set. Because it operates on the assumption that transactions are valid until proven otherwise, this design can provide greater efficiency as users don’t need to re-execute transactions and the working fraud-proof mechanism incentivizes honest behavior.
It gives applications on Ethereum the opportunity to take their existing code and deploy it as a sovereign app-chain rollup on Avail without spinning up their own validator set to do so. This gives developers the ability to customize their app-chain for their specific needs, free from the constraints of a shared blockchain. Because it’s EVM compatible, it also gives developers the ability to use familiar tooling out of the box providing a familiar developer experience.
Due to its unique implementation, the app-chain has the ability to hard-fork by social consensus if needed. This is because the rollup’s logic is not embedded inside a smart contract bundled up on the L1 blockchain, something which prevents this from happening in a typical smart contract based rollup design today.
This prototype also includes support for a native token freeing up developers to concentrate on the app-chain’s core logic and functionality while OpEVM takes care of the underlying blockchain infrastructure.
We invite developers and enthusiasts in the broader community to use, contribute to, and enhance the technology. You can learn more about it here.
ZK Apps & Async Composability Exploration
The Explorations team is working on an exciting and exploratory project that delves into async composability within validity proof-based applications running on top of Avail. This will unlock innovative user experiences and also fortify secure communication between independent sovereign app-chains in a modular context.
The team is working on a PoC implementation to showcase cross-app message passing and how that can be used to perform atomic operations without synchronicity assumptions across chains. The same DA layer enforces a common trust zone between apps and the project aims to leverage that to showcase newer interoperability constructs, highlighting the growing powers of the modular ecosystem.
More on that soon.
Adapters
The Explorations team has built a number of adapters allowing developers to leverage Avail’s highly optimized data availability layer and plug Avail directly into the modular blockchain ecosystem. More adapters are coming soon so keep an eye on this forum for the most recent developments.
Avail OP-Stack Adapter
Optimism’s OP-Stack has become a popular choice for building rollups for a number of teams. The Avail OP-Stack Adapter allows anyone to quickly integrate Avail into the OP-Stack and leverage Avail’s highly optimized and cost-effective DA layer. This provides rollups with massive cost savings while still allowing settlement on Ethereum via Avail’s Data Attestation Bridge. It’s EVM compatible, providing flexibility over a wide variety of tooling.
zkEVM Validium
Polygon zkEVM has become a popular choice for developers looking for ZK-Rollup technology with EVM equivalence. The Avail zkEVM Validium has been adapted to use Avail for data availability and sends an attestation to Ethereum proving that Avail validators have reached consensus on the data’s availability through Avail’s Data Attestation Bridge.
Sovereign DA Adapter
The Sovereign SDK provides the ability to build new sovereign ZK blockchains. This construct enables correct chain execution and DA verification to be done on the client side giving users greater control and autonomy. Smart contracts are not embedded in the L1 like they are with Ethereum-based smart contract rollups. This embeds the fork choice rule with the users themselves, providing greater sovereignty than what’s offered by today’s popular rollup constructs. The Sovereign SDK also enables developers to build blockchains with custom logic using tools like the risc0 VM that allows verification of execution of any arbitrary code, instead of having to build a general purpose VM as a rollup, providing greater flexibility in how the blockchain operates.
The Sovereign DA Adapter makes it simple for developers using the Sovereign SDK to implement Avail as the base layer. You can learn more about the Sovereign DA Adapter and this novel Rollup construct here.
Madara DA Interface
Madara is a project by Starkware to build a decentralized sequencer for the Starkware ecosystem, using the Substrate (now Polkadot SDK) node. Madara will use the Starkware prover and will allow Validiums to be constructed. The Madara DA Interface built by the explorations team makes it simple for developers using the Madara Sequencer to utilize Avail’s DA layer. This is particularly useful for developers building chains that leverage Starkware’s ZK technology and developers can still settle on Ethereum via Avail’s Data Attestation Bridge.
Rollkit DA Adapter
Rollkit allows developers to deploy any Cosmos chain as a sovereign chain on top of a DA layer like Avail. Currently, Rollkit operates as a pessimistic construction with full nodes re-executing all transactions. However, the Rollkit team is working on support for optimistic constructions to avoid re-executing transactions and Avail will support this when it’s done. Rollkit is particularly well-suited for developers who have experience with the Cosmos SDK and want to use Avail as the DA layer. The Rollkit DA Adapter was built in collaboration with VitWit.
Get Started
Check out the Avail Uncharted Repo on Github where you can learn more about these projects. You can also ask questions on this Forum about any of these projects and anything modular blockchain, Avail or data availability related.
If you would like to propose a new project idea, discuss it with the team here, on Discord or via this contact form.
Now let the uncharted explorations begin!