Avail: The Unification Layer for Web3

GM, GM, everybody! Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders to showcase something they've either started up as a new company, a nice weekend hack, or anything in between. So if you have an awesome project to show, this is your opportunity to do so with the Web3 community. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Prabal Banerjee, who's co-founder of Avail. So if you didn't know, Avail is a Web3 infrastructure layer that allows modular execution layers to scale and interoperate in a trust-minimized way. So if you stick around for today's show, you'll learn what Avail is and how its unification layer enhances scalability, interoperability, and security. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM, welcome to the show, Prabal! Ecstatic to have you on. My pleasure, and yeah, we're all excited to have you on as well and have the opportunity to learn all about Avail. I guess before we get into that, do you want to give a brief introduction about yourself, just in case folks aren't familiar?

Yeah, so hey, I'm Prabal, I'm one of the co-founders at Avail. Before starting Avail, I was one of the lead researchers in Polygon, essentially led the research there among many other things, POS network, Avail being one of the things, and other efforts within Polygon ecosystem. I had a pretty academic journey before that was in the cryptographic research part, started my crypto journey as part of my PhD program, did four years of research there before dropping off to join Polygon, which was known as Matic back then. So that's my journey in a very nutshell.

Awesome. And I guess what drew you to Polygon as your first base in Web3?

Yeah, I think mainly at that time when I started looking into blockchains around 2016 or such, we already knew that scalability of blockchains is a major, major pain, right? And we could see that happening already in Bitcoin and we could see that coming in Ethereum. And Ethereum was trying to have a much more scalable approach, was trying to announce the rollup-centric roadmap and so on and so forth. At least at that point, they had started with execution sharding and such. And so that is from where I started looking at the scalability problem of blockchains. That was one of the core research areas of my study as well. And looking into Lightning Networks, into state channels and optimistic rollups and such around that time, it became pretty clear that we need different solutions to scalability problems and how exactly to build scalable blockchains. Around 2020, when I thought of joining the industry, Polygon was one of the only ones who had a scalable blockchain in production. They were already scaling Ethereum and it had the same properties as that of Ethereum and such in terms of the execution environment and so on. All of this kind of, you know, made me attracted to that company. We knew that at least at that point, it was one of the, you know, pioneers in terms of scaling. So yeah, that drew me into the organization.

Awesome. And like I said at the beginning, we're excited to hear about Avail as your second chapter, or I guess third chapter if you count your academic points as your first, in Web3. I guess without further ado, let's get right into the meat of the content. Would you like me to bring up the slides now or...?

Yeah, so hey everyone. Just today wanted to kind of, you know, give a very high-level overview of what we are trying to achieve at Avail. And mainly I will be focusing on the use case and the next wave of them, which we are trying to enable as part of all the infrastructure that we are preparing. Will not completely focus on the infrastructure bit or how we are building it, but want to focus on why we are building and what are the things that this will enable. Essentially the vision with which we have started Avail is how to build scalable trust. What that means is what is the essential component of the society that kind of, you know, glues it all together? How technology plays a big role in massively improving the life of individuals and how blockchains can play a major role in how it completely changes the game about trust-minimized interactions, about verifiability, about permissionless nature of it and so on. So that's where from where we started and it became very clear to us that there were few things which make this entire scalable trust possible. And that is that it has the infrastructure has to be scalable, it has to be interoperable and it has to be secure. So mainly these will be the key themes over which I'll be going across.

But before I go there, I think one of the main core theses is that, you know, programmable trust is the centerpiece around which at least in my opinion, we build the Web3 infrastructure. And we want to discuss the status quo and at the same time, what this new wave is going to enable. That is the key area where we will focus today. Now one of the things which we heavily focus during building Avail is that of unification. But before we get into what, like how we exactly do that and so on, it's important to address that what exactly is unification, what are we trying to do and how exactly does it all impact the people building on top or the users interacting with these systems. Now if you think about it, essentially today's Web2 systems, the systems, the technology that we keep on using every day, they are essentially pieces of infrastructure all knitted together to form a web, that's why it's called a web, right? That there are different pieces of infra all tied together to create a seamless experience on top. Today when you interact with a web page, you're not only interact with a single server or a single program or a single application, you are actually interacting with a host of them, although it seems like you have never left that web page. That's the power of the Web2 interfaces that we see today and that is how it has been able to cater to billions of people of the world. And that's how technology is, you know, improving the quality of lives of people.

Whereas in Web3, one of the major bottlenecks have been like how does a single system scale up to the demand of the millions and billions who use it. That has been one of the key areas where we had looked into. As I discussed in the very beginning, this was one of the major, you know, interesting areas which completely dragged me into this rabbit hole of how do we build scalable systems and so on and so forth. Now when we started thinking about what does blockchain exactly mean, what do we mean by when we say it's a blockchain, it essentially is a ledger which has the entire history published and available. Now that is an key concept of how blockchains work. You can go and fetch the transactional data and then recompute yourself whether the execution has been done correctly. This is a key ingredient of what blockchains mean. There are cryptographic guarantees that allow you to verify the entire executional correctness of a blockchain. So you do not have to rely whether it did its task correctly or not, you can verify it yourself. This self-verifiability is one of the key aspects why people do not need to trust these Web3 infrastructures, they can verify them. This is very unlike what we see in classical Web2 systems, where essentially you are at the mercy of the providers. You are at the mercy of whoever is hosting that application about what they do with your data, about how they give you the guarantees, whether they do something else with it and so on. Of course, legal guarantees aside, there is almost no guarantee in a verifiable manner that the interactions are going to be anywhere trust-minimized.

So that we are trying to change in these newer systems that we are coming up with. But once you have, let's say, the data published and this blockchain in itself, there are typical bottlenecks towards how many transactions it could process, how much data it can execute and so on and so forth. What that means is you will right now see that there are, you know, these hundreds of different blockchains all trying to do one task better than the others, right? So you will see one of them has a very high liquidity, the other has a very good support for games, the third is a very high settlement value, the fourth is has deep in infrastructures behind it, the fifth has real-world assets, the sixth has, you know, some NFTs, so on and so forth. And this is only going to get increased with what is known as a rollup-centric roadmap. So what do, what does rollup-centric roadmap mean? What it means is you do not scale the entire blockchain itself, but you you kind of extract parts out of it and scale individual parts in like separately. What that means, this is what is known as the modular architecture that blockchains, the entire revolution that blockchains are seeing today. And what that essentially means is that you do not execute a lot of transactions inside the same layer, you take those transactions outside, execute them and then come back with a result of the execution along with a proof. That is the key, you know, motivation behind the entire journey behind modular infrastructures.

In this kind of a world, when things are very much fragmented, we want to unify the experience. Think of it like how again coming back to Web2, how there are different services all at play, but as a user, you get a cohesive experience. We want to bring that kind of an experience to the end user through our unification bridge. So that is what we mean by unification in the Web3. With that premise, we are kind of building three different parts, out of which the first major milestone is what we have reached last month with Avail DA going to mainnet. So this is our data availability platform, as I mentioned that data publication or data availability, the availability of the transactional data behind those blocks are very, very crucial towards making these rollups scalable and verifiable. And that is why Avail DA forms the key base layer over which these modular infrastructure can reside. That is something that we have been working for a very long time, first within Polygon, then we spun off from Polygon to create Avail, and now we have launched Avail DA on mainnet. I will briefly touch about the other pieces of the puzzle that we are working on and then go on to the use cases.

But before going to all of that, like it's important to understand that with whom we are building, what what are the different components and who are the partners in our journey here. So we definitely work with the rollup SDKs, what that means is the infrastructure or the development kit that you use to design one of these rollups. There are major ones like Arbitrum, like Polygon and StarkWare and ZKsync, with whom we work work so that these development platforms or the development kits are essentially integrated with Avail, so as a developer, they can immediately benefit from Avail's DA layer and Nexus. But apart from all of that, there are rollup-as-a-service providers which kind of, you know, take all these components together, package it so that the end developer who wants to just create a rollup with with some level of customization, they can get this pre-packaged. And that's why we're working with, you know, leading RaaS players like AltLayer, Conduit, and others in terms of providing this to the end users. There are many chains with whom we work on on solving this problem. Like all these chains, we are very good partners, some of them have production-grade chains who work with us in order to solve solve the fragmentation problem that is prevalent in our industry. There are wallets which help the end user, like how does the end user benefit from all the interplay of technologies that we have or we have been working on. Again, there are other frameworks like a Rollkit or a Movement, who are coming up with these very, very innovative execution environments, blended executions, and app-specific ones and so on, which completely will change the game. We will kind of start seeing very, very application-specific rollups in the coming days. Um, there are of course gaming, DeFi, again, I can go on and on about the entire, like set of players who help us in making this visionary a reality.

Now coming to individual use cases, right, enough of like talking about what we are trying to build and what are the different things that are at play. Er, about individual cases where we are seeing innovative applications getting built, I think DeFi is one of them. I'll start with DeFi because again finance has been something which blockchains have really shown the way about how things can be so much trust-minimized, so much different, so much permissionless and and so on. Uh, so it is important to understand how DeFi kind of works and today, and how these kind of newer systems are going to change that entire ecosystem. Um, so if you if anyone is interested and has looked into DeFi, they know and by DeFi I mean decentralized finance, right? So if anyone has used kind of er a blockchain system for financial applications, for example, to take a loan or to convert one asset to another and so on and so forth, they would know that there are key issues which plague today's DeFi infrastructure. One of them is scalability. So the moment there is a lot of transaction volume, a lot of, you know, different swaps or different requests come into these platforms, because they are essentially all running on chain, these applications all run on chain, they face the similar difficulties as that base layer. For example, you will see that during times of heavy economic activity, Ethereum gets clogged up. Ethereum starts, you know, having very high gas fees, so people start complaining that, you know, sending USDC from from one to the other takes in the order of tens of dollars and even more sometimes to do, which is of course unsustainable, right? Who will use an infrastructure which can which cannot scale with demand? And this is very much unlike the experience that they are used to and hence this pinches the the the normal person who is getting onboarded to this industry.

The other thing which happens is I'm not sure whether um you guys have tested with it with different kinds of platforms. For example, you have let's say some assets on Ethereum, but some other assets on Arbitrum, some others on Solana, something else on Avalanche. There is a bunch of these chains right now, but if you are interacting with all of these chains, it's extremely hard to even remember how many how much assets you have lying around in all these different chains. The overall experience of just managing these assets across the different layers is quite hard. And there are excellent teams working on it right now to make this very, very smooth, very easy. You will see there's a lot of discussion about chain abstraction, about how these wallets are completely abstracting away that experience and giving a very, very unified experience, unified interface on top so that you do not have to worry about which actual base chain your assets reside on. So at Avail, what we are trying to do is we are trying to work with these partners to have unified access, which means that just different financial systems, how they can integrate with these Web3 systems and how across different networks you can manage these assets as I discussed. Um, then cross-chain transactions, how do I make it from one to the other with with as much as minimized trust as you can. What I mean by minimized trust is you don't want to go through another bridge which gets hacked, or you don't want to lose your assets while moving from one chain to the other, and this has, you know, impacted so many, so many users that it completely shows us in bad way. And then, you know, scalability, like how we are trying to completely change the game with having off-chain execution and such.

I will try to quickly go over a few of the others here. Um, in in payments, just like I probably have already discussed about, you know, swaps, but also about a lot about payments. There are similar problems: the interoperability, the geographical restrictions that you see in Web2, these are completely, you know, gotten away with what we have seen in Web3. But not it's not about just the cost or the user experience, it's about the censorship resistance, it's about the permissionless nature of it, it's about empowering every individual with having access to financial institutions and financial tools which kind of, you know, we want to we want to play our role in to towards enabling that. In terms of gaming, there is also, you know, very much push that we are right now seeing. There are people are plagued with although there are many, many companies which talk about having Web3 in their games, but actually when you play that, the experience is not that good. You have to sign them multiple times, you cannot interoperate between chains, you cannot interoperate between games, like it's just a right now it is basically NFTs wrapped around games which are you are probably seeing today. We don't we want to change that, we want to completely change the cross-chain asset management, we want to change the real-time nature of availability, we want to change the experience by making the entire sequencers, you know, having incentive in tokens of their choice and so on and so forth. So the entire shift is happening in the gaming industry as well and we are seeing fondamentally fondamentally new style and suite of products being built in this industry.

And then we have also been looking into, you know, physical infrastructure networks like, for example, what do you do when you need compute? Do you go to an Amazon's AWS or a Google Cloud, or do you take someone like a Spheron to look for your needs? It's when people and communities come together to share their physical infrastructure is when these kind of, you know, efforts take shape. And we are seeing excellent, excellent work which is happening in the new in the in the recent days, where you can you can currently see that a lot of these do not know how to coordinate between different chains, where exactly will it reside, how will the coordination game happen, how do I solve the fragmentation and such. And that is where we are trying to bring in our modular architecture, bring in Avail's Nexus in order to ensure that the interplay at the infra level remains as smooth for the developers as possible because we know that when the infrastructure becomes ready, then we will start seeing new innovations happening on the application layer. Much like you had to push for mobiles to first have a camera, have an enough, you know, processor to be able to process those games, before you started seeing full action-packed games and Ubers get using GPS and Instagram using your phone camera and so on. So you it it's a interplay between applications and infrastructure where every every like layer has to push the other towards making things better for them.

And we are also seeing this in new frontiers. We are seeing this in AI where people are there are AI players who are using Avail to ensure that there is seamless integration, there is real-time data publication happening. We are also seeing a lot of, you know, scalability opportunities coming up in Bitcoin, because Bitcoin has been very, very conservative in its application layer, but at the same time, new L2s are coming up which are completely opening up that game and and making these L2s a reality. But overall, it's about enabling real-world assets, real people coming together and using this entire Web3 more like a tool in order to build scalable systems which can in turn scale trust. You do not have to now go and trust a centralized entity, you don't have to trust a geographical state, some other foreign actor in order to make sure that you get the best-in-class experience. Now we are trying to have a world where every individual has verifiable information, has verifiable guarantees of the interactions that they are doing.

So I would, I know I've probably run a bit more than what Narb suggested to me in the very beginning, but hopefully that kind of covered a some ground on what are the different application and the avenues in which we are trying to push the boundaries which are there right now. Over to you, Narb.

Oh this was wonderful, Prabal! Thank you so much for for going over all of that. I guess, crowd, if if you have any questions, please feel free to to post them on the chat and I'll bring them up. But in the meantime, I have a couple questions of my own. So you touched on it briefly in in a couple slides back around some interesting applications that you're seeing people starting to build with Avail, around AI and Bitcoin. Maybe could you get into a little bit more in the specifics around what exactly some of those applications are and if anything has stuck out to you in particular?

Yeah, I think again in the Bitcoin space, there is a new wave of innovation which we are seeing right now and that is coming with these Bitcoin L2s. Now there is a lot of different, you know, opinions about whether they are actually real L2s or whether they are sidechains, whether they are rollups, whether they are something else, whether they have a trust-minimized bridge, whether they are, you know, centralized entities turning into Bitcoin whales and so on and so forth. But there are a couple, like a few projects which are essentially doing very, very innovative work there. So one of them, of course, I can talk about at the application layer, but some of them which are very close to my heart is is the technological improvements which we are seeing. There are teams which are pushing for OPCAT. OPCAT would enable actually verifying rollups inside the Bitcoin base layer. We all know that addition of opcodes into Bitcoin is very, very hard, that community has been conservative and rightly so in my opinion, in terms of adding new features. But that is something which is extremely interesting for me. Then there are some non-custodial threshold ways in which people are trying to build bridges, trust-minimized bridging, which has been a very, very challenge. Like it's easy to say that yes, I have a a chain which act like settles on Bitcoin, but how does the settlement work? Does it inherit the security of Bitcoin? Because it doesn't make sense for us to talk about a Bitcoin L2 which doesn't completely inherit at least most of the properties of Bitcoin. And those are some of the some of the things where I think a lot of new work is getting done. Of course, it's it's still like a few months away in my opinion to see which of them come into production, because it's easy sometimes to do POCs, but it's a different game to come them into production, but there are there are some promising ones.

In AI, like again, there is a lot of people just are skeptical and and me also, where a lot of people just come in and say, 'Oh, I'm doing crypto and AI together.' But there are few projects which are really, really pushing what it can do. Again, baby steps, but at least verifiable, you know, inference which are happening inside the AI space. They are very, very interesting to know because of course we are seeing the good side of AI right now, but we are also starting to see the the counter side of it, right? And the more and more we we will be at the mercy of centralized entities trying to give us the inferences and the outcomes of these AI models, we are going to be like these are single points of failure, essentially like all the all the applications which rely on the same entity are going to all suffer if that turns rogue, for example, which we do not want. And these kind of ideas are what underpin the entire movement from Web2 to Web3 and similar ideas are now sparking in the AI industry, which are good to see, although real-world scale is yet to be seen in AI itself, but at the same time, it's far, far, far lower in the crypto space, crypto cross AI space.

Good answer, good answer. And fair points. I guess in terms of people getting their hands dirty with Avail, this being a DevNTell show, what's the best way for people to start building on Avail?

So essentially, just going to our documentation hub, which is the documentation website of ours. You can check out what is exactly Avail in more detail about how to exactly get started, what are the SDKs, what are the languages, what are the different platforms that you can use and so on. So all of them have been are there on the on the dev portal. On the other hand, we are even today working on a blog post which should come very, very soon, which kind of, you know, tries to collate all the resources together so as to just answer your question with a simple link. That's what we are trying to enable so that no matter whether a developer is coming from a smart contract background or like a entire protocol engineer or completely outside of Web3, we should be able to give them something that caters to their interest and at the same time they can start using Avail. Of course, Avail being a DA and a Nexus play before we come with Fusion, it's extremely er underpin inside the infrastructure, the top-layer infrastructure that people build. So almost it's seamless when people start using an infra project which uses Avail internally. So they will probably not even understand that it's all powered by Avail, but they would still inherit the guarantees of it.

Excellent, excellent. And I'm looking forward to seeing people building some cool weekend hacks with this. And I guess as people are building, if they have questions, where's the best place for people to get those questions answered and meet other like-minded folks who are building on Avail?

So the best place will be Discord. Discord is where most of our interactions happen. There is also a Telegram channel where it's because of a single channel, the conversations get muddled up sometimes. So Discord is where developers will be probably have their specific channels where they can discuss and such. If someone is a new developer who just wants to know more about Avail and just wants to explore, we have an excellent DevRel team who can guide them. But I would also have, yeah, my Twitter handle is PrabalBanerjee, so feel free to hit me up and I can connect you to the folks who can or I can even answer questions that they have. So yeah.

Excellent. And yeah, that information is going to be on the description of the YouTube channel below. So definitely getting contact with the team if you have any questions there. And unfortunately, that brings us to time today, but Prabal, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to teach us all about your awesome project.

Thanks a lot for having me, it was fun. Thank you.

Yeah, likewise. I guess with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be and looking forward to seeing you all get your hands dirty with Avail as you build some cool projects here. All right. Have a good one! Bye!

Bye!