Avail, a project that spun out of Polygon earlier this year to handle data storage and verification for blockchains, launched its data attestation bridge on Friday. This new offering is designed to reduce costs for layer 2 and layer 3 chains in the Ethereum ecosystem. The bridge is connected to Ethereum and can be used by both zero-knowledge and optimistic rollups that use Ethereum as a base layer.
Storing data on Ethereum can be expensive, so Avail aims to be a solution for layer 2s and 3s to publish data off-chain, to reduce the high transaction fees that often come from posting data on the main Ethereum blockchain. This helps to spare the main Ethereum blockchain from getting congested with anything besides execution and settlement activities.
The data attestation bridge establishes a direct connection between the L2 rollup’s data and the L1 via Avail’s off-chain data availability layer, Avail said in a press release. Anurag Arjun, the founder of Avail, told journalists that when an L3 or a validium sends the transaction data to Avail, the data attestation bridge provides the attestation on Ethereum. This then proves to Ethereum that whatever data was submitted by the rollup to Avail is actually available.
Avail spun out of Polygon in March and released the second phase of its Kate testnet in June. This testnet was designed to encourage validator participation in the network. In the longer term, Avail wants rollups to launch entirely on top of its network. These networks could include so-called validiums, which are Ethereum scaling solutions that store transaction data off-chain.