About Demex Whitepaper Launch App
About Demex Whitepaper Launch App
By Samyukta Narasimhan in Partnerships —

Demex and Avail Leverage Data Availability for Next-Gen Trading

Demex and Avail Leverage Data Availability for Next-Gen Trading

While security and decentralization often steal the spotlight, data availability (DA) is the unsung hero of scalable blockchains. This article dives into DA, exploring its significance for users and examining existing solutions.

The Blockchain Trilemma and the Rise of Data Availability

The core of blockchain technology lies in three pillars: security, scalability, and decentralization. These elements create a publicly accessible ledger that's both secure and highly scalable. However, achieving all three simultaneously has proven challenging. Early blockchains like Ethereum faced significant scalability limitations, hindering network growth. Solutions like ZkSync, Optimistic Rollups, and Polygon emerged to address these limitations.

Source: Electra Protocol

Why Data Availability Matters for Scalability

Data availability strengthens the crucial pillar of scalability. As a network expands in size, transaction volume, and user base, ensuring public data availability becomes essential. This allows for independent validation and verification of transactions, fostering transparency and preventing fraud or censorship.

What is Data Availability?

Data Availability refers to the cornerstone principle in blockchains that ensures all network participants can freely access and verify the legitimacy of on-chain transactions. This transparency is fundamental to maintaining trust and security in a decentralized system. Data availability encompasses all forms of data crucial for validating transactions, including:

  • Transaction data: This includes details like sender, receiver, amount, and timestamps associated with each on-chain transaction.
  • Block data: Block data refers to the complete information bundled within a block, which includes transaction data, cryptographic hashes of previous blocks, and other block header information.
  • Historical data: A complete and immutable record of all past transactions and blocks on the blockchain is essential. Data availability ensures this historical record remains accessible for verification purposes.
  • On-chain data: This refers to any data directly stored on the blockchain itself.
  • Off-chain data:  In some cases, blockchains may rely on off-chain data for specific functionalities. Data availability protocols need to ensure the accessibility and verifiability of this off-chain data as well.

By guaranteeing data availability, blockchains empower users to independently verify the network's state and the legitimacy of transactions. This fosters trust and prevents potential issues like fraud or censorship within the network.

Challenges and Solutions for Data Availability

The primary challenge lies in the cost and storage required to manage massive data volumes. Data Availability protocols or layers have emerged as a solution, acting as data clouds offering services to multiple networks while maintaining individual network data privacy and security.

Data Availability Solutions

Several Data Availability protocols are actively being developed, including:

EigenLayer's EigenDA: A Unique Approach with Shared Security

While Avail and Celestia function as independent solutions, EigenLayer introduces EigenDA (Eigen Layer Data Availability) with a concept similar to shared security. EigenDA leverages the existing security infrastructure of Ethereum by allowing projects to "re-stake" their ETH to participate in the EigenDA network. This approach is akin to shared security because projects benefit from the security of the Ethereum network without having to run their own validators. This offers several advantages:

  • Reduced Capital Costs: EigenDA eliminates the need for a separate validator set, significantly reducing capital requirements for projects compared to solutions like Celestia.
  • Faster Throughput: By leveraging Ethereum's security, EigenDA boasts processing speeds 200 times faster than Ethereum mainnet (https://medium.com/tag/eigenlayer)

However, EigenDA also presents unique challenges for token design:

  • Social Consensus: EigenLayer requires a mechanism for independent social consensus outside of Ethereum's framework. An EigenDA token could potentially facilitate this social consensus.
  • Payment Token: While EigenDA leverages Ethereum's security, a native token could be used for DA payments and reservations, offering greater financial control and potentially mitigating inflationary concerns.

Avail's Tech for Scale: Breaking Down Block Production

Avail's architecture is designed to be scalable and accommodate a growing number of users and transactions. A key aspect of this is separating data availability from other blockchain functions. This approach,  called the "lazy proposer model," significantly improves scalability. Here's a breakdown of the model:

  • Block Builders: Multiple participants in the network act as block builders, each creating small chunks of the block data along with an associated verification commitment.
  • Data Sharing: Builders share their data chunks and commitments with the network through a peer-to-peer (p2p) network and with a designated proposer.
  • Proposer Role: A single block proposer collects the commitments from the builders. They then perform random sampling on the network to confirm the validity of the commitments before applying erasure coding techniques (a method for data redundancy and error correction). This combined original and extended commitment becomes the block header.
  • Header Sharing: The proposer shares the newly created header with validators in the network.
  • Data Availability Sampling: Both the proposer and validators perform Data Availability Sampling (DAS). This involves randomly sampling data cells from the p2p network or directly from builders. They then verify that the sampled data matches the corresponding commitment for that specific row in the data matrix.
  • Block Acceptance: Once validators reach a statistically significant level of confidence through DAS, they add the block header to the chain. This signifies acceptance of the block.

Benefits of the Lazy Proposer Model:

  • Reduced Workload: By distributing block production tasks, the lazy proposer model reduces the workload on individual nodes, particularly the block proposer. This improves overall network efficiency.
  • Scalability: The ability to distribute tasks allows the network to handle a larger volume of transactions without compromising performance.
  • Similarities to Traditional Blockchains: The lazy proposer model shares similarities with how individual blockchain transactions are handled in traditional blockchains. Transactions are broadcast to the network, and block producers collect and bundle them into blocks. In Avail, data blobs and their commitments function similarly to transactions.
Source: ODaily

Overall, Avail's architecture with the lazy proposer model demonstrates the power of separating the Data Availability layer. This separation allows for significant optimizations that enhance scalability compared to blockchains where data availability is tied to other core functions like execution.

Demex and Avail: A Partnership for Scalable Perpetual Trading

Building on the concept of shared security within EigenDA, Demex is partnering up with Avail to overcome the data availability challenge and achieve a scalable perpetual swap platform. Avail acts as a separate layer, storing and verifying transaction data for Demex's perpetual trading. This collaboration offers several advantages for Demex users:

  • Faster Transactions: Avail's efficient data storage and verification mechanisms enable faster processing of perpetual swap transactions, leading to a smoother trading experience.
  • Reduced Costs: Offloading data storage potentially reduces Demex's operational costs, which can be passed on to users in the form of lower trading fees.
  • Increased Security: Avail's robust security measures provide an extra layer of protection for user funds and ensure the integrity of the perpetual swap market.

The Future of Data Availability

As blockchain applications become more complex and require ever-increasing data storage, Data Availability (DA) protocols will play a critical role. These protocols will be essential for ensuring the scalability and security of future blockchain ecosystems. Collaboration between different DA solutions like EigenDA, Celestia, and Avail will likely be key to achieving this goal. A robust and collaborative DA ecosystem will ultimately pave the way for wider adoption of blockchain technology.

Here's how this collaboration might unfold:

  • Interoperability: Different DA solutions can develop interoperable standards, allowing blockchains to leverage the strengths of each protocol. For example, a blockchain could utilize EigenDA for shared security and Avail for its high scalability features.
  • Specialization: As the DA landscape matures, we might see specialized DA solutions emerge. Some protocols might focus on high-throughput data availability for DeFi applications, while others cater to the needs of NFT marketplaces with unique data storage requirements.
  • Open-source Development: Fostering open-source development within the DA community will be crucial for innovation and security. Open-source collaboration allows developers to build upon existing solutions and identify potential vulnerabilities more effectively.

The TLDR

Imagine a blockchain like a giant record book. Data availability ensures everyone can access and verify the entries in this book. As the book gets bigger (more transactions), storing all that data becomes a challenge. DA solutions like Avail help by efficiently storing and verifying this data. Demex, an on-chain perpetuals trading DEX, is partnering with Avail to leverage this efficient data storage for the platform, resulting in faster trades and lower costs.