Key Points
Ethereum is making significant progress to help layer-2 rollups scale, but requires unifying infrastructure from impartial third-party entities to improve the user experience, according to Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail.
During the ETHGlobal conference in London, Arjun discussed the current state of the rollup ecosystem.
Unifying the Ethereum Layer-2 Ecosystem
Arjun, along with Sandeep Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani, and Mihailo Bjelic, co-founded Ethereum layer-2 Polygon before shifting his attention to building a rollup-neutral infrastructure to bring together the Ethereum layer-2 ecosystem.
While at Polygon, the team transitioned to developing technology that aligns with Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap following the launch of Polygon’s proof-of-stake chain.
Arjun explained that this change also necessitated new infrastructure.
He said, “We knew in a world of rollups that you also need scalable data availability. So we started Avail within Polygon back in 2020.”
In March 2023, Arjun obtained the intellectual property rights from Polygon to continue developing Avail, allowing him to establish a separate company with Prabal Banerjee.
Arjun shared that their goal is to become a rollup-neutral platform that serves major rollup protocols like Starkware, zkSync, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
Arjun explained, “The technology that we’ve implemented is called data sampling. It’s very similar to what Ethereum wants to do on its sharding roadmap.”
However, the roadmap is lengthy, with full danksharding functionality only expected to become a reality in the next few years.
Arjun believes that rollups might not be able to wait long for data sampling capabilities that facilitate the efficient verification of rollups.
Arjun noted, “We realized during the journey that we would solve rollups scalability via scalable data availability. That would end up enabling a world with tens and thousands of rollups, but a very bad user experience.”
This is a fair assessment of the current Ethereum user experience, where users need to switch between different rollups to bridge funds or execute transfers or swaps.
Arjun aims to resolve this fragmented user experience and the disjointed nature of rollups.
He said, “Theoretically, we take proofs generated by the independent rollups and aggregate them into one so that you can allow rollups users on rollups to talk to each other.”
The ultimate goal is to create “a unified rollup ecosystem”.
To achieve this, a trustworthy, neutral third party is required to coordinate this process between different rollups doing different things.
Arjun compared this to the Solana blockchain, which he described as one “big chain with a lot of apps,” while its users only have to deal with one chain.
On the other hand, Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap has resulted in an ecosystem with many different L2 chains.
Arjun stated, “If you look at like apps on the internet, they are not on one giant supercomputer. They’re on different cloud services and talk to each other when required. We anticipate the same happening with rollups in general, and we want to enable that cohesion.”
Avail Nexus aims to facilitate this specific integration standard between rollups, similar to Polygon’s recently launched Aggregation layer, which aggregates proofs created by rollups built on the L2’s chain development kit.
Avail’s technology can take aggregated proofs from Polygon’s AggLayer, Starknet, Optimism, Arbitrum or Scroll and creates a “coordinated rollup”.
Arjun describes the technology as an effort that spans the entire ecosystem, rather than catering to one ecosystem.
Arjun noted that the ecosystem is already contemplating this future problem.
He recalled a recent presentation from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin that posed this very question — who is going to build the infrastructure to unite rollups?
Arjun concludes, “Either it has to be the Ethereum Foundation, or some third party who is not in the rollup business.”
Buterin also attended ETHGlobal in London and emphasized the importance of a mindset shift toward building L2 decentralized applications and solutions in line with Ethereum’s focus on rollup-enabled functionality.
