The Endgame of Data Availability w/ Prabal Banerjee (Avail)

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you for joining us for another episode let's begin with a question how can participants in a blockchain network be sure that all the data of a newly proposed block is available first let's start with why this even matters if the data is not available a block might contain malicious transactions which are being hidden by the block producer for example without having access to all of the data a malicious proposer could transfer all of the eth from the burn address or the

deposit contract into his personal wallet and the ethereum network would be forced to accept it without even understanding what it was accepting under normal circumstances this isn't a particularly challenging problem a block producer is required to publish all of the data within the block and so every other participant can simply download the whole block and verify every transaction manually while this Paradigm works it quickly runs into scaling challenges right now according to Ether scan there are roughly 6,000 indiv individual computers participating in the ethereum network now we can't know that for sure that's just an estimate

but every 12 seconds a new block is produced and this new block needs to be sent to every single node on the network let's say a block is roughly 1.5 megabytes so every 12 seconds roughly 9 gigabytes need to flow through the ethereum network furthermore each node needs to be able to download process and verify each block every 12 seconds and so block size has direct implications on the minimum requirements of the computers participating in the network but what if we started to get a little more sophisticated What If instead of requiring every node to receive and process every block we

spread this data out this would not only free up a ton of bandwidth but would lighten each node's individual load the result we can both increase block size which means throughput and decrease minimum requirements which means decentralization and so with all that background out of the way I am so excited to announce today's guest pral bannery the co-founder of the Avil project we began this intro with a question Avil was built to answer the question we call the data availability problem during the next hour you'll get an incredibly deep understanding in of how probal and the Avail team are

building the next generation of data availability infrastructure and by the end of this episode you'll begin to see what I saw that data availability is just the first foothold that a veil will use to unify web 3 one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then and now Mr proval bannery pral thank you so much for

joining us on the strange waterer podcast thanks a lot for having me of course man I'm so excited like right now is like this incredible data availab availability moment and like you kind of can't have that conversation without talking about Avail so perfect timing and perfect conversation but um man before we get into it I'm a huge believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it so with that kind of as a frame can you tell us a little bit about yourself how did you find crypto and like ultimately what got you passionate enough in blockchain scaling and data availability that um LED you to aail yeah I mean in in general I had a pretty academic background so I was uh you know studying computer science and cryptography always

something which fascinated me so nothing nothing crazy so I just went ahead and studied more of it went into a PhD program in that I encountered blockchains it seemed like the perfect place for me to you explore a lot of different fields inside computer science and Beyond including economics Game Theory those kind of stuff which always fascinated me in general so it only seemed to you know seemed wise to pursue blockchains so did four years of research there got completely blue pilled by it um you know the different facets of it the trade-offs completely fascinated me so yeah then went ahead and uh was not getting the thrill just doing academic

research so you know dropped out of the PHD program to join polygon uh which was Matic Network back then and uh yeah then LED research there um and then finally spun aale out of polygon like within polygon as well were like one of the first things that I started working on was Data availability we always knew that it was going to be one of the most like uh groundbreaking innovations that is going to happen in the blockchain space and in general we knew that execution scaling needs to go hand in hand with uh data availability as well so that was one of the things and as you know polygon already was working on execution scaling

they wanted to scale ethereum so yeah that's how we started this journey and and then it slowly became clear that we need to make a whe credibly neutral spun things off to create a separate entity with my fellow co-founder anurag who is also a co-founder of polygon so that is my journey in a nutshell and I guess before we like really get to like aail the company in this moment that we're in I'd like to talk a little bit about this polygon time and like really so we as a blockchain community and as ethereum Community like this whole strategy towards scaling blockchain has gone through a lot of iterations and like originally we thought we were going to do execution charting and like when that became a mess it we like came up with

this idea of like State channels which turned into plasma which turned into rollups and only once you get to rollups do you start to understand like oh there might be a role for something called Data availability so I guess like I would love to Let's rewind back to like when you're head of research at polygon and when you're just like doing your regular job can you help us like understand what it was like within polygon to realize like okay we're we're changing paradigms like that has major implications for polygon proof of stake and I guess the question why I'm ultimately trying to get to is why did youp polygon decide like we need to create a data availability solution ourselves and not just think like hey dank sharding is coming that's the data

availability solution we should be like pushing forward the native ethereum solution as opposed to creating your own yeah I think I would like to roll it back a bit more and try to explain my journey more from my research perspective so first of all in 2016 when I started looking into this field um the main thing that we were already seeing is the huge transaction fees right so that has been a big Challenge and of course one of the major things that we were looking at even while looking into Bitcoin was how to scale it how to make it affordable to normal people in order to achieve the goals of

decentralization in in Mass right so otherwise uh technology in its uh n and from if it remains a niche then it's not uh it's not good enough right for for uh for every person to use because without the users technology do not survive right um in that regard we were already looking at least I personally was looking into you know lightning channels and such and there were many different attacks that we were looking at and how to make it better make it more secure make it more dependable make it more cheaper um so these kind of things were already on the top of our mind and uh uh fast forward like after this few years of research into these kind of scaling

Solutions and fairness and uh you know making scalable distributed systems when I joined uh polygon um I wouldn't like to take the credit for this entire ship because they had already done that Journey from 2018 to let's say 2020 when I joined that they had tried to make plasma they realized that plasma by itself is going to be hard and they had to you know do a POS so when I joined it was a plasma / posos chain so you had both you had the hybrid nature of it and that's that's when I realized that I I came to see the hard implementational uh nuances of what a plasma solution

needs to go through um so at that time uh polygon and the the the people like uh you know anurag and JD and others at polygon they already well convinced that you know it has to be a rollup Centric the only way to scale is through offchain execution that was very clear right and that is the fulcrum over which plasma polygon POS polygon rollups they all stand upon so all that Journey was already like the the the thoughts were already there then the point is that if you want to take uh a road map which is ex which is you know offchain execution and

rollup Centric what do you need to build to be able to support this this road map right and it was pretty clear that rollup was one of the things that uh we wanted to build but Rolla by itself will not give us the ability to expand beyond what is already available right um and that is be that is why we you know started the journey with aail and so on on the other hand the ethereum road map of course there were different stages of it again depending on the timelines uh and I'm not good with dates but uh in general there was as you said there was EX ution

starting then there was you know the rup Centric road map in the rup Centric road map also it has to go it has gone through various different changes even in the dang sharding road map the number of uh you know different shards and such have been changed the uh the different specs has been changed as should be the case right so research evolves technical specifications evolve and so on and so forth um so at that time we knew that it would be in the end ethereum uh Danang Shari but you know that it might take a lot of time because ethereum is securing a lot of funds and it's it's it's very natural for them to

to take so long to be able to make such a big change because the change if you sit down and look at the amount of change that is needed to be done for dang Shing it's immense it touches all the different you know parts of ethereum today across all the clients and at that time even client diversity was lower but at that time it was already clear that it's going to be a big Challenge and that's why if you want to be at the top of your game you need to lead the Innovation and not just wait for something to happen right so and and polygon has always kind of you know try to do that that you know show by

shipping a solution and that's that's mainly I would say what the what the you know theory was at that point what the spirit was within the team at that point in time um the best in-class solution which was there on paper at that point in time was the lazy Ledger pepper the Celestia guys so I mean huge credit to them for for you know specking that out so well at that point in time already we knew as a company that we want to heavily bet on validity proofs and not fraud proofs so it became very clear that we don't want a DA solution which is validity proof secured whereas we are looking at execution Solutions which are

secured by valid proofs right it's a mismatch like why should I have execution which is secured by uh validity proofs but have the da which I have to wait for for some time right so that is the main like one of the few of the reasons why uh we were thinking of you know building building a solution of our own of course it started as a POC right it started as a PO it even started before that just as a you know as a scribbling on a page and then uh we were like okay can I build a PC is it hard how complicated it is and so on is it possible even to do it uh because the validity proof Solutions can be

computationally heavy and we were seeing immense improvements in the ZK space which made it made made us realize that it is possible so from there on we kind of you know slowly slowly we started building more and more of it and that's when the conviction really hit us got it so just to like summarize what you said and tell me if if I got the vibe right is that essentially like even before you arrived at polygon it was clear that we are going down if not the rollup Centric road map a road map that like scales by uh disassociating execution from settlement and all basically like dis associating settlement with like the results of settlement and what you guys realize is this is the way that

ethereum's going yes we understand that this is going to be built into the core protocol at some point but like if we wait around for that our lunch is going to be not only eaten by like other companies that are already starting this but like you the technology the understanding of the technology might change right out from under you like in the time that you're waiting it for for it to happen and so you guys just decided like if we believe in this the responsible thing to do is to start building it absolutely absolutely and that is that is exactly the kind of thing which also you can see that today a lot of the evm Centric uh boundary pushing has been already done by the

polygon P the activity that it has seen the amount of State growth that it has seen the amount of traction it still gets and the amount of transaction the the sheer number that it processes even today is is something admirable right so so that has always been the spirit so let's talk about what a veil is and I think that anyone who has found this podcast like doesn't need a 101 on like what a rollup is and then how data availability kind of like folds into that but maybe if you could give just two sentences on like what is the problem statement and then I would love to get into like how can we understand a veil um in contrast to I'll call it the public option right like dang charting

as well as like some of the other competitors that are coming up and we don't need to be specific but just for the audience's um knowledge like what I'm kind of referring to here is like Celestia or aan da or like the other um programs that are are coming down the pipeline and I'm not going to ask Pro Bal to like directly uh do a competitive analysis but can you just help us understand like what makes a veil different from just like the generic data availability layer yeah yeah so I think our goal is to unify web3 right so there has been you know so much segmentation in this space because there has been so much activity uh and some of them has been in silos so the goal has been to unify the web3 and if we think

about what does it mean to do that right what does it mean to go ahead and unify something we have to understand the the forces under it right so the forces right now is that there is a lot of demand and the base layer Supply is not enough and that has led to huge congestions that LE leads to rollups and all of all of us know that rollups are the designated way to scale blockchains under that thesis what we need is abundant blob space and that is why ail da is what we are building first right we need blob space today in order to support all the rollups that are getting built right now and all the application specific chains and the

explosion of it that we are going to see in the recent future so that's what ail da does but we also were thinking very hard about what does it mean to give this abundant blob space how does it look how does the ecosystem look at that point in time and that's where we realize like you know we have to solve the fragmentation the thousands of rollups cannot operate in by themselves right so so they cannot be like Standalone systems that's not how you know your typical web 2 works that's not the experience that we want to give the users where there is so much headache when you want to do anything beyond a

single blockchain and that's where we were doing we are doing aail Nexus AA Nexus is essentially a proof composition system that we are building on top of ail da which any of the rollups can use to seamlessly interoperate between them right so that is what we are trying to do with ail dexus and then we were thinking that yes all of this builds a very seamlessly integrated system but we also need a very secure system and that is why we are building ail Fusion which brings in external assets like a Bitcoin or an ethereum into the aail ecosystem

so as to significantly improve Pro the security of the system and the entire ecosystem build around it so that's aail I know it's a it's a mouthful and that's why we can keep talking about them in bits and pieces but I would like to go directly into the second part of your question which is what about other people in this space so the first thing to say is that we are very very glad that all these players are in the space and that is because because as I just mentioned right now some of them like all of them Inspire us all of them you know push us to learn and be better at the same time there are significant

differences in terms of tradeoffs it's not about who is good and who is bad there is no absolute terms in in technology like no one like none of the systems or the people building are like fools to take uh a bad uh you know choice right so everyone is kind of picking a different point in that spectrum and that is why it's important to understand the tradeoffs the one of the primary Trad hours between let's say a fraud proof secured system and a validity proof secured system is the user experience the latency the you know the verifiability of it right so that is where we decided as I discussed a while back that it was from the very beginning

that we would deci we had decided that we will go with a validity proof secure system system rather than a fraud prooof secured system because it does just didn't make sense for us to use another one and after that we knew that we had to make a decentralized system because it's going to be like if we had to build a very secure base layer a base layer needs to be heavily decentralized and that is where we chose some of the design choices that we have like a fragment election system a nominated proof of stake so those kind of things allow us to have let's say a thousand validators today and then maybe tens of thousand of validators in the future and that to without centralizing the entire stake or the control of the

system to the hands of a few we can keep the system highly decentralized and still being efficient with a large validator set so those kind of things we were trying to do and at the same time we also knew that ordering and polinomial commitments and such need to be uh enshrined part part of the protocol because if we offload these essential parts to off offchain then it creates more problems because a Bas land needs to do sequencing because that's where the crypto Economic Security comes from so those kind of things kind of you know inspired us to choose the trade of space the trade of choice that we did in this

space and uh that's how you know we are very very different on the D apart from the DLR as I said there are many other things which we want to involve and that's a discussion that we can get into yeah so again just to summarize and tell me if I kind of got the message of this right but what what you're pointing out is that like in order to really understand um the differences between different da layers you have to really think about like the very technical and very specific trade-offs that you're making and part of that is about like technical reasons in performance and like whatever but really what it comes down to is those choices which like don't sound interesting like fraud

proofs versus validity proofs like those Ladder into real user experience and if what you're kind of saying is that what aail is doing is taking the approach of like let's start with the user and then let's figure out which like technology choices we need to make in order to get there as opposed to not picking on any names at all but somebody else who might just say we understand what the technology needs to do let's build it and then let's figure out how to make it like more compatible for users yeah absolutely I mean uh that has been the the journey from the very beginning right that it has to be user Centric and at the core of this entire technology if we do not put the users then we will keep being a niche right which has all

the technical jargons but doesn't have the essential part of it which is the users so of course they were the the center point around which we have built the technology and that is why we are not only building the D because if you go and ask a user about what a d does they shouldn't care like whether they know it or not doesn't matter they should not care about what is the D what are the security guarantees because they need to be abstracted out of it and if we are the the essential reason why we are building uh a whale as a whole as an ecosystem is to make the make it possible for the user to be ignorant about these and still have a meaningful

experience that they would know so you're on crypto Twitter so I know that you have like seen the argument that I'm about to bring up but um the thing I've noticed in like the last few weeks is this whole like conversation about like salana versus ethereum and I've heard the salana guys say like salana is focused on user experience and ethereum is focused on technology and again these are salana Maxi saying like things about salana but in that debate I like the question that I kind of like want to yell at the podcast that I'm listening to is like man when you say users like who are you talking about like because it's easy to be like I want my user to

be like this guy who's right about to like get into meme coin trading and like cares about like the the how it feels to push like sign a transaction all that stuff but like I don't think that any real humans will ever be touching any of these core protocols directly and so like it begs a question like well if your users are other protocols like maybe the right thing to be doing is like optimizing for protocols and not for like human like retail use cases and so I I bring this up to ask you when you say that your So when you say that Avail is optimizing for users what does that mean to you no I think you bring in a very pertinent question right so there

are many different takes to kind of you know talk about here we can have maybe a full podcast on just this topic but let me try to kind of enumerate it a bit right the first thing to say is that any kind of user is a user right I don't care whether they are a mem coin Trader whether they are a bought whether they are extremely crypto Savvy whether they have never touched a computer system they are all different users maybe not my target user but they are genuine users in this space a bot is also a genuine user in the space because if you

just if you do not consider Bots you will probably be having nothing in the space and that's the reality whether you like it or not right and uh and this is in general right this is not about just uh just the crypto space it's also about in general trading space you will see a lot of these are are bought and automated and and things like that right so and that's part of it you have to build for these kind of systems as well so all of them matter the next thing is it's not about it's not about user experience for the protocol level it's about the user guarantees at the protocol level protocol levels give you guarantees users are interacting with applications

which abstract these technical guarantees right at least that's how I would like to think of it right now how what do I mean I mean that for example when you go to um a Google you do not care about the correctness of the auction that is happening when you hit the search Stone right there is an auction happening you do not care you have you might have not studied uh Game Theory you might not have studied auction mechanisms and so on and so forth but it doesn't matter it shouldn't matter what you care about is like okay if I use Google I get better search results let's say than any other

solution that I use or it's the defacto standard I have never used anything other than Google at all ever in my life whatever be the reason uh they are all legitimate users and these users are being secured not by the protocol themselves but by uh app developer who is using of various sets of protocols in order to enable their users to a particular service right and that's where the world that we want to go in with app chains so we want to see a world where applications are nothing but application specific chains which are you know custom tuned to the service that they are offering to their user and

for aw da and the a Nexus these are the customers we are trying to our users are actually these app chains which abstract us out to give the final user an experience that they would want so again there are plethora of uh you know hierarchial uh systems here at play but I would say that no matter whom we are building it for uh we need to give verifiability because that that is the reason why we are building web 3 otherwise web 2 was good enough like we didn't need you know another set of huge uh investment and uh both in terms of

money and in terms of brain power by the you know best people in this world into a separate space if we already had it since 20 years and that's why verifiability is the key what kind of assurances you are trying to give to the user are the key otherwise web to systems were good enough yeah man' for sure everything you said just resonated so much and um you're right like we could just do a whole podcast on this so I will just kind of take the turn back to a veil but um other but but just quickly thank you and like that's such a good answer and I think to like bring it back to what I said about salana versus ethereum I think for Builders specifically like at the end of the day all of our end users are real humans that want to get something done but like

I caution anyone when they're building core protocols that are supposed to be used by other protocols you shouldn't be thinking about like the experience of like okay like then metamask needs to pop up then I need to like read through the metam because like that's just not the endgame State and like nobody thinks that we're building this so that like Grandma can be doing like direct trades on ethereum L1 in Unis swap yeah I mean um that is that is genuinely true but at the same time there are nuances there as well and I again um we have to be covering both sides of the story as well right so for example like when we talk about eips for example there are many eips which would

definitely improve the ability for these wallets to abstract out stuff right and I mean I was just having this discussion today and this has been so like happening so often is that the experience of transacting on any blockchain is just not good enough even today like the no matter what kind of tools that you use if you want to do things very securely then you know it comes down to a a ux versus security tradeoff at the very end and that's why some of the improvements at the protocol level also need to enable applications to be built on top that can help the end

user whom they are trying to uh go to like for example a a web two example here would be yes you can build a service which just exposes apis but if you do not have a rich enough set of apis then no good application is going to get built on top because of the lack of apis no no totally totally fair and again we could keep going I'm just GNA bring us back to aail so back to aail um we talked about basically three pillars of the business that you're building Avail da Avail Nexus and a veil Forge right Fusion so oh fusion fusion yeah yeah okay uh so let let's kind of walk through each one and I think that again we've we've gestured enough at data

availability people understand um like what date availability is hopefully um I'll put some links in the show notes in case you don't but um can you talk to me a little bit about like the tradeoffs the specific trade-offs an app chain is making when they're choosing to uh use a veil as a data availability layer as opposed to um like the blobs that are within ethereum themselves and I think like that is kind of the important question um like we have the public option that is like actually built into the cryptoeconomic security of ethereum and so like my question to you is like if I'm an app

chain and I want to like deploy this new system that that leverages data availability like how would you sell me on like choosing a veil as opposed to like the built an option of ethereum yeah I think again it comes down to the guarantees that you would want to give and the features that you would want to expose so the one of the first things that I keep on saying is that verifiability and that is not because of you know what we have been building and so on and so forth but essentially it's one of the most you know important parts around which we build the entire ecosystem so by iability I mean that is where the trust minimized interactions

come from and without trust minimization we almost have nothing in this in this field and now if you think about using an ethereum versus using uh ail for data availability right now as it stands with the Proto dang sharding already implemented you would have to rely on the ethereum validator set in order to know that they kept the data actually available or you can run a full node of your own to know that right so either you have to host a full node or rely on the economic guarantee of ethereum so on on aail we already have a working light

client Network which you can use to sample and effectively know by yourself uh whether the data is available or not and data availability sampling is is the fulcrum why all of the ecosystem that we are trying to build can be built on a will so what does it mean it means that you on you in your in your Smartwatch you can essentially go and run a program which samples and knows whether the data is actually available or not and you don't have to rely on anyone else and doesn't matter who but anyone else in order to know whether the data is available so

that's one thing and then the second thing is again we already use the technology that dang sharding is going to use in the future and we do almost the last Parts which are already optional in the dang sharing road map right so that's things that we have built for the last you know 2 three years is is essentially very crucial to the peer-to-peer Network that you need to build of the light clients which allow you to effectively sample and keep the data published even if the super majority of the validators tries to you know hold it back in the end so those kind of guarantees are going to be there

on aail then there are of course things about you know size and cost and things like that so right now 128 KB blobs you have to use all at once right so you have to use the entirety of it even if you want to use let's say 1 KB of for da you still have to use 128 KB and you still pay for it and there are only three blobs available in average six in total uh which means that the effective uh you know the effective limit that you will have is something like 350 is 400 KB right so on the other hand at oil we have a 2 MB block size today and which can increase it because we have been

empowered by data sampling we can increase the block size to a much much larger size we have tested up to 120 M blocks and that works without any problems without optimizations and Stu so those kind of things immediately improve what we can offer and then not to say about ail Nexus where you can then talk to other rollups which use ail and Beyond to seamlessly talk to one another do message passing in a trust minimized manner and and so on and so forth and and also have a very high security so that's the overall uh pitch that I would say awesome so I want to get to Nexus in a

moment but while we're still on uh just like the straightup data availability side so first of all um let me just make sure I understand why data availability sampling matters and it's essentially because without it like in the Proto charting that we have today in ethereum like in order to ver verify that these blobs are available you as you said either need to download like create a full node which I do in my uh I do in my fiance's closet like let me tell you everyone out there like it's a it's a pain in the ass like it's a big deal right so you either need to do that or you need to trust someone like INF fur and Alchemy and then on top of that like they have the whole blob and they just

need to send you the whole blob and then like that's how you verify that it's there and what data availability sampling says is I know that every computer in this network is supposed to have this blob but I don't need to like see the whole blob to believe that let's say if there's 10,000 pieces I'm just going to call like 50 random people and ask for one of that thousand pieces from 50 and if all 50 come back and verify I can assume the entire blob is entire thousand are there and like that just gives you like by leveraging the power of probability you're able to like like I said you know check 50 instead of a th and like that that's like your scaling Factor so first of all is that correct yeah absolutely absolutely you put it

really well I think better than me well thank you thank you and so what you're saying is that you're correctly pointing out that like that's in the road map in a little bit of a pipe dream right now for dank sharding but like aail with like the power of like small team move quick and just the expertise that you're bringing you're able to fast forward to the end of the DK sharding road map and then get like two chapters later and think like what other features could be built on top of this thing and then you make that available today as for developers to build today as opposed to DK sharting which like hopefully we'll have like within the decade yeah absolutely and again uh this is as I said like ethereum is a highly secure network right and we want

to do our job in order to assist is assist it in order to show that what the bottlenecks can be and uh as you know like it's it's it's extremely extremely heartwarming to see people talk about blobs which we have been you know trying to push for so long because blobs are the essential you know data structure that we use uh inside ail as a data publishing right so U it it's it's very good to see that and that is exactly you know the reason why we are trying to push for and show the show the world that this is so much so much power in this technology that can be built and and that's why it will it will

unlock real powers of of blockchain systems so last question on straightup data availability which is we have spent the last 40 minutes essentially talking about like the value of crypto is this credibly neutral space and how do we get this credibly neutral space it's through these technologies that provide trust minimization and like I am so totally on board for the uh rollup Centric road map and like how do we superar charge a rollup Centric road map is data availability the thing that like gets me a little bit caught up in in like what are we doing here is the the data availability Paradigm like I I don't know what your specific configuration is

but like a veil is not supposed to hold these blobs in perpetuity they're supposed to hold it long enough so that like they're available to indexers and long-term storage and like so that someone can come and pick them up and hold them in perpet and again this makes sense from a scaling standpoint but like what really starts to freak me out is ethereum has now transformed into something that like all of the necessary components to operate it are not internal and they're not under its control and they're not even really like affected by its incentives or like slashing or anything and so I've heard a thousand people give a thousand

different answers which basically boil down to like well ether skin is just going to like suck up all these blobs and that's where they'll live but I would love to hear from someone actually building these systems like how do you think about not the data availability side but the long-term data storage side and how to like build that in a way that's congruent with like Trust minimization of ethereum yeah I think that's a that's a very fair point so there are again two ways to uh answer it first I will say the popular answer which you will not like and then the second one would be a less popular answer which would probably be AIT bit more technical so the first thing is essentially what you're are saying is that ethereum has Network effects which

doesn't allow it to arbitrarily you know do something which breaks all the tooling that has been built around it and and on the other hand the flip side of that is that the tooling is so mature that it can support that Network right the first way to answer it is that we are aiming to have that Network effect so that the tooling around it becomes so mature that you can rely on that tooling to keep the data available and you do not need to the tooling includes archive nodes and you know this block explorers and so on and so forth yeah the second way to answer it is that the rollups are the people who should keep the data

available for a long time that's one way to talk about it is that whose data is it what is the user interacting with and that is the reason why the applications need to keep the data and not the da layer the da layer is essentially doing only one job which is publishing and making sure that the author or the publisher of the data is actually not hiding significant pieces of it or any piece of it right so that's the role of the DF right this is these two are again the the popular answers which might convince a few might not convince a few the other way that we are trying to

address this problem is that we cannot rely that the tooling will be built right because we are so uh new to this space we have to actively work on making sure that the tooling is there so there are two things that we are actively doing first for significant time when the tooling doesn't arise we will keep the data ourselves just like we will run archive nodes just like any protocol does and this is across all protocols even ethereum themselves they also run archive notes no matter how much tooling is out there right so we will also keep on doing that that's one but the second thing that we are doing is we are actively working with pro pro like projects like filecoin and RV and so on

in order to take that published data and then put it into a and into a storage right and that means like putting it into um some of some of these storage providers for long-term storage the other thing to that we are also kind of doing here is the trust minimization aspect right so the trust minimized way of doing this is essentially what is the digest against which you are going to query and how where are you getting this digest from right and that is where our headers contain the commitments to the data so if and any any blockchain is defined by

the header you can never you know you know delete the headers and say that oh I have forgot the headers and I still want to have uh any any confidence in the system and that is why if you have the headers you always have a commitment to the data for which the block was built and the public guarantees that it had hence after you pull it back you can verify exactly that the data that you published is the data that you get back and this is the same guarantees that we use in the light Clan Network as well as you explained yourself so I as a light client I pull in 50 different stuff from others and then verify how do I verify I

do not verify by downloading the entire block and checking against the entire block I verify using a proof of inclusion and the same things can be done even if I have the data in a long-term storage which is then retrieved back later and then checked against so again I'm giving a very very long answer because this this actually is a is a real problem because we are just in the space and ethereum I mean many people still don't know that the ethereum is going to delete it after 18 days right and they always get amazed and that's how it's going to look like you will probably not even know because the tooling around it is going to keep it secure but uh we are trying to

actively find the right balance between uh what we are doing and how the ecosystem matures so everything that you said about like the Technical Solutions and um like kind of the big p picture strategic things that like the Avail Foundation can do like work with someone like an R Weaver a filecoin something like that makes so much sense but I want to highlight what you said about like maybe we push this on the applications and like it's their data they're the ones responsible for it because like I just want to highlight this you're so right like today ethereum you know like with some caveats is trust minimized but like every single time you go on a website like the website is acting as

the middleman between you and ethereum and like they're just sending you a transaction that basically none of us know how to read and then we click the button that says sign and it goes through and so like there's this layer between us called the applications that none of us really address as like they're fully trusted even like the most decentralized Unis swap front ends like GMX front ends everything and kind of what you're saying is hey we're already trusting those and they're the ones generating the data like what it means to be trust minimized is that the base protocol can verify whatever these applications are saying but it's still on them to hold it yeah absolutely correct I just want to add one subtle Point here because you

already touched upon it is that when these front ends load the data right when they query the data they query through centralized endpoints which means they don't even verify whether the response that they are getting almost always they don't even verify that they they are actually included in the blockchain so if infura or Alchemy they won't but if they chose to go on a different Fork all the user applications are going to be on that because they do not check for finality guarantees of ethereum on the other hand our light Cent interactions are built up in a way

where every interaction that you do is actually checked against a finalized header that is the commitment against which you check and that is why it is much much more trust minimized than what experiences that you are getting today without even going through the centralization risks yeah yeah yeah ma'am awesome so again could continue on this for another whole podcast but um and I I'm just going to be honest with you I don't even think we're going to make it to Fusion but let's let's move to Nexus right now um and I I think what is so interesting about building uh and and push back if you don't like this term but building an interop uh solution within a data availability network is

that like data availability is inherently about um creating records of transactions that are verifiable right and so I guess I would love for you to hear sorry I would love to hear from you a little bit about like how a veil Nexus works and like really want to pick apart is this just kind of a bridge in which we're using like the state of each chain to like verify certain things and once we're able to verify we just release assets from a smart contract or is this really about looking at all of the blob data that comes in and then doing the actual analysis to ensure that these things are valid and once you can see that they're valid like fraud proofs

validity proofs who cares like that data is good and so you can uh facilitate that transaction so I guess the question is like can you explain to us like how uh a veil Nexus works I I have found the perfect answer because you have basically given the two ends of the spectrum and my answer is like it's the best of both worlds and I will try to Define one so in bridges the essential you know the problem with Bridges is that one chain needs to trust the other chain in order to talk to each other and that is where why Bridges have been so much problems have been with Bridges right and that is because one chain has no view of the other

chain and it has to trust the super majority of the other chain there are many any uh you know Bridges which are way inferior than this setup but at least we take the status quo right which is light client with one or another now the problem is that there are security Deltas here what I mean by that is let's take two Cosmos chains two Cosmos chains with very varying security guarantees because of very varying amount of stake that that they hold they wouldn't necessarily want to talk to each other because there is so much Gulf insecurity which means that one asset when bridged to the other chain which is of much much

smaller economic guarantee it can get manipulated because it's so easy to overtake this chain and manipulate assets inside and then Bridge it back right so that's the you know tension when you are doing bridging between two different chains on the other hand what you said exactly makes sense that you would because you have the data publication in the same layer you can take a look into the transactional data and see whether the transactions were done correctly and then in for on top of it what you were essentially trying to probably say is that there are shared security because they actually share the security layer what I but when I say it is the

best of both words I want to also emphasize the point that they need not look at the entire transactional data they can only take the validity proof and the commitment to the transactional data and that is good enough and that is the superpower you do not need to download all the transactional data you just need to do data aity sampling on top to know that all the data that which was commitment that it was committed to was available and then you need a very succinct validity proof that the execution was done correctly and that is powerful enough this gives you the entire view of the other chain which is using the same because they share the same security

zone so to say so that is essentially how Nexus works when two rollups they use Nexus for da one chain can just verify the entirety of the other chain but by verifying a single validity proof and vice versa without having security tradeoffs so that is essentially the proof composition of of Nexus here does that make some sense no no that makes so much sense and I just so I want to find like the most delicate way to answer this question but sorry to ask this question because I know that you guys are like completely uh polygon aligned and like Believers like obviously um but

can you just help me understand like when I'm looking we had Brendan Farmer on this podcast and he talked to us about Ager and so like can you help me understand like how these two products like interact are they serving the same purpose or what it sounds like is that um that maybe they're just like kind of completely different Technologies where um AG is really focused on sharing value on ethereum L1 specifically where aail is like kind of has the same functionality if you're just looking at ethereum but the point of a veil is to expand that much Beyond ethereum I would say yes and a no yes the the scope is much larger and the no part is that it's basically

complimentary right so they are not exactly completely different systems that are going to sit on the on the out like outside each other or not talking to each other the idea here is essentially that when you look at a polygon EG layer or a starware fractal scaling or a you know arbit from orbit or uh optimism side chain uh super chain sorry and uh you know these kind of entities which are coming up ZK syns hyper chain all of them talk about similar operations right they talk about composing things either between the the rollups which use their stack or Beyond

right but the fact of the matter is that this leads to you know fragmentation in that space and that is where what we think is we can act as complimentary to this Solutions because we are credibly neutral we can you know take those proofs compose them and make them talk to each other irrespective of what ecosystem do have they have whether that be all ethereum l2s or Beyond so that's the main power of Nexus and at the same time as I mean we will also take let's say an intermediate proof from an EG layer and then work on top of it because that's the only way to grow right and we that is the reason why we want to you

know focus on the unification aspect of it because that is extremely important uh for us okay perfect I think I very much understand because when we are talking to Brendan and uh we've talked to a few interop like dedicated companies and my question like always boils down to it seems very clear that in order to make this multi-chain future we just need to minimize the amount of transactions on ethereum L1 and how are we going to do that basically every well-funded huge company is going to create the shared value contract and then use something like ZK to create like an accounting system on top of it and my question for that always was like okay so is the way that defi or or

crypto going to look is essentially we have like eight Giant honeypots on ethereum L1 that don't talk to each other and like if you want to move from an arbitrum orbit chain to a starkware stark net chain like you have to go back through L1 and I think what you're talking about is like because in all of these super chain ecosystems there can be rollups that opt into a veil that kind of gives you these hooks into each of these uh giant pools of capital that will allow you to uniquely transfer value between them um in a way that like somebody like polygon directly would never be able to because like Stark would be like no why would we just let

you be the winner when we want to be the winner yeah I mean and and we have had this conversation uh for example with all the ecosystems when we were within polygon will you use us as a d the answer was no right so and it was very clear and the the like the the direction is pretty clear there on the other hand I would also want to say that we can because the da layer is has to be part of the security guarantee a guarantee cannot be given by is the validity proof itself a validity proof is not a uh a silver bullet to solving all scaling Solutions right a validity proof need to be

checked against a commitment and the commitment comes from the D and hence to give a complete Security to the end user you need to have those proofs against the commitments which only a d can provide and that's why it is not only just complimentary it's actually a lot more to what they can offer in across all these ecosystems because they either have to rely on the valid on on the da guarantee given by the base layer ethereum or they have to give have a economic guarantee given by any other da layer but they cannot be giving it in a trust minimized manner yeah and I think just to take a step back and kind of tie

this whole conversation together and again you are so interesting and your Project's so amazing like I'm annoyed that we didn't even get the time to cover all of it but um just to take a step back like the thing that I'm really taking away from this conversation is coming into it I'm not going to lie to you coming into it my question is like okay if you're going to use data availability like that's you're supposed to use dank sharting and everything else is like like oh like what if we took this thing that's part of the trust minimized thing and then like a bunch of private people made the same thing like and choose us and and what I'm realizing from this conversation is the data availability is this like kind of interesting layer of infrastructure that

like as you build just to get the basic functionality it puts you in a position to like tie together so many other of like the big hairy problems that are in front of us that like yes you need to say data availability cuz that's like the project you've been working on for four years and like that's the one that you can get VC funding for and that's the one that people understand now but like after this conversation it wouldn't surprise Uris to me in 10 years we look back at a veil and then the the story will be like yeah they started with data availability but that's not what they are and um you know I guess like my would love to leave you with just any final words of like does that resonate with you like when you think of like the endgame of a veil like what are you

envisioning yeah as I as I you know began my words by saying like we wanted to unify web 3 and that that is the goal we have been fighting amongst each other we have been trying to you know push the boundaries with between the like within those silos and it's time that we get mainstream adoption by just uh you know being more collaborative by being a more united force and that's what we are trying to build here and uh yeah I mean I would just like to say that you know we are our incentivized test net is done we probably will have by the time you publish this uh few good uh announcements to make but at the same

time our mainnet is launching very very very soon and hope to see you guys all there using it yes well you you cut up in front of me a little bit and I'm pretty sure there's going to be no major announcements by the time this is released because this will be released tomorrow but um with that so everyone listening right now you need to get on Twitter and follow Avail and like understand that big things are coming so with that ball can you just help the audience understand where they can find you on Twitter where they can find a veil and like if they're excited about building in this you know like modular like true integrated web 3 world like what's the best way to get started yeah I would say that again I'm pral banery

on Twitter ail project is the official Twitter handle go follow us um the best way to get started is just to head over to our Discord and start asking questions you can even DM me or anyone of our team and we'll be you know glad to you know talk through and help you in whatever way we can and at the same time again if you are excited about building on this space anything which is Rule up Centric applications specific anything where we can try to help we would be you know happily you know uh trying to engage with you right so that's uh that's us and hope to see you guys uh on Discord and on of course man this is so

awesome and uh let's hang up right now so that we can uh start talking about scheduling to come back on and like hit all the things we didn't get to talk about and like so much more questions that opened up so pro ball thank you and uh have a good rest of your day thanks a lot for having me it was really fun thank you again and have a good day n