Avail

Avail is a modular blockchain infrastructure project providing data availability and cross-chain coordination services to the fragmented Web3 ecosystem. Spun out of Polygon in March 2023, the project launched its mainnet on July 23, 2024, and has established itself as one of the leading dedicated data availability (DA) layers in the modular blockchain stack.

The Problem

Building scalable blockchain applications confronts two compounding obstacles. First, rollups and other scaling solutions that post transaction data to base layers like Ethereum face scarce and expensive blockspace: every byte published to an L1 costs fee market rates, capping throughput and driving up costs for end users. Second, as the multi-chain ecosystem has grown, users and liquidity have become siloed across dozens of incompatible networks, requiring complex bridge interactions, fragmented balances, and a poor experience for anyone operating across chains.

Avail was designed to address both constraints through a complementary three-layer infrastructure stack: Avail DA, Avail Nexus, and Avail Fusion.

Avail DA: Cryptographic Data Availability

The foundational layer is Avail DA, a purpose-built data availability blockchain that allows rollups, validiums, and sovereign chains to publish transaction data cheaply and with cryptographic verifiability, without routing that data through Ethereum or another L1.

Avail DA combines three cryptographic techniques. KZG polynomial commitments create compact proofs that data has been published, anchoring a cryptographic footprint in each block header without requiring validators or light clients to download the full dataset. Erasure coding extends data blobs with redundancy, making it computationally impractical for any subset of nodes to suppress or withhold data. Finally, data availability sampling (DAS) allows light clients to verify data availability by requesting small random chunks rather than complete blocks. As more light clients join the network, sampling capacity grows horizontally, allowing the network to support progressively larger blocks without increasing the burden on any individual participant.

Avail DA achieves 250-millisecond preconfirmations and 20-second DA finality. The validator network launched with 1,000 validators, with the architecture designed to scale to 10,000. The layer is compatible with major rollup frameworks including Arbitrum Orbit, Arbitrum AnyTrust, OP Stack, ZK Stack, Polygon CDK, and StarkWare's Madara framework, and more than 70 chains and projects have integrated or partnered with Avail DA, including Monad, Lens Protocol, and Sophon.

Avail Nexus: Cross-Chain Coordination

The second layer, Avail Nexus, addresses chain fragmentation directly. Rather than requiring users to interact with bridges manually, Nexus operates on an intent-solver model: users specify a desired outcome and a decentralized solver network competes to find the optimal execution path across available liquidity. TEE (trusted execution environment) and ZK verification protect against replay attacks, quorum failures, and liquidity-fragmentation risks.

Avail Nexus launched on mainnet with 11 chains live and more than 50 additional chains queued for integration. Active integrations include decentralized exchanges QuickSwap and Clober. A partnership with Mayan extended Nexus to support larger cross-chain transactions. The Avail Widgets product extends this further, allowing any application to embed Nexus cross-chain functionality through a single SDK integration, moving cross-chain liquidity access from a separate bridge interface into the application layer itself.

Avail Fusion: Shared Security

The third component, Avail Fusion, is a planned security layer designed to give chains building on the Avail stack access to pooled crypto-economic security. The design supports restaking of major assets including ETH and BTC, providing a shared security backstop for chains that would otherwise need to bootstrap validator sets independently.

AVAIL Token

The native AVAIL token launched alongside the mainnet in July 2024 and serves three primary functions: paying for data availability services on Avail DA, staking to secure the validator network, and participating in governance over protocol parameters. Chains using Avail DA pre-purchase data credits in their own ERC-20 token, providing predictable and transparent pricing for block space consumption.

Team and Funding

Avail was co-founded by Anurag Arjun, previously a co-founder of Polygon, and Prabal Banerjee, who led research at Polygon. The project originated as an internal Polygon initiative in late 2020 before spinning out as an independent entity in March 2023.

Avail has raised approximately $75 million across three rounds. A $27 million seed round closed in February 2024, co-led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly. A $43 million Series A followed in June 2024, co-led by Founders Fund, Dragonfly, and Cyber Fund. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund participation across both rounds is a notable signal of institutional confidence in the modular DA thesis.

Ecosystem Relevance

Avail targets a broad blockchain audience. Its DA layer serves developers building high-throughput rollups, privacy-preserving chains, gaming applications, and real-world asset platforms across multiple execution environments. The Nexus unification layer is relevant to any DeFi user or protocol facing cross-chain liquidity fragmentation. While Avail's current partner integrations are concentrated in the Ethereum rollup ecosystem, the intent-solver architecture of Nexus is chain-agnostic by design, meaning the network is positioned to extend connectivity to additional ecosystems over time. As multi-chain DeFi continues to expand and users increasingly operate across many chains simultaneously, Avail's infrastructure stack represents a foundational bet on modular, interoperable blockchain architecture as the long-term settlement model for the onchain economy.