Polygon announces scalable data availability infrastructure Avail

The Polygon team is set to launch a data availability solution for sidechains and layer-two protocols.

Ethereum (ETH) scalability infrastructure developer Polygon has announced the rollout of a general-purpose, scalable data availability solution called Avail.

According to a release issued on Monday, Polygon revealed that Avail will function as a data available tool for execution layers like sidechains, standalone networks, and layer-two protocols.

One of the major hurdles for effective blockchain scaling is the data availability problem. Malicious actors can broadcast blocks to the network with incomplete data and other participants will be none the wiser.

To tackle this problem, the Polygon team stated that Avail utilizes erasure coding and polynomial commitment to combat data encoding fraud proofs by creating a two-dimensional data availability layer.

Rather than creating their own data availability protocols, execution layers can offload the role to the Avail layer with the latter acting as a secure data hosting site.

For standalone chains, interfacing with Polygon’s Avail will reportedly enable these networks to rely on the latter’s validator security protocols. Thus, these chains will be able to solve the data availability problem without needing to run their own validator set.

For layer-two protocols, the announcement revealed that scaling solutions like Validium can expand their scalability throughput by deploying Avail to secure the data availability function offline.

Commenting on Avail’s importance within the context of ongoing efforts to boost blockchain scalability, the announcement quoted Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun as stating: “Avail is a key component of a new paradigm in which blockchains will work in the future.”

“We believe off-chain scaling solutions and standalone chains will require a robust scalable data availability solution and we are excited to be working on this problem,” the Polygon co-founder added in the release.

Polygon’s popularity continues to be a growing trend within the crypto and blockchain space with an expanding user base that reportedly hosts 1.4 million unique users. Popular decentralized finance staples like Aave and SushiSwap have also established a presence on Polygon.

Cross-chain liquidity protocol Ren has also recently created a bridge to allow users and projects to port their Ren-based wrapped tokens to the Polygon ecosystem. Back in May, the team released a software development kit to enable developers to create Ethereum-compatible standalone chains as well as layer-two protocols.