Data Availability Landscape
Modularity is a viable solution for blockchains aiming to scale. Multiple L2s, focused on the settlement, execution, or data availability layers, have sprung up on Ethereum to boost transaction speed, lower transaction fees, or enhance security by providing a shared set of validators.
Blockchain Layers
Settlement is the blockchain layer in charge of transaction verification and validation, which is performed by a set of validators, thus ensuring transaction irreversibility.
Execution — the blockchain layer in charge of transaction execution, also called the application layer.
Consensus — the blockchain layer in charge of transaction ordering in a queue for execution.
Data availability — the blockchain layer is in charge of transaction data storage, which provides historical data when queried by clients, thus ensuring blockchain security.
The data availability layer (DAL) is crucial for maintaining the integrity and security of blockchain networks. It ensures that data related to transactions is not only available when needed but also immutable and un editable. It is thought to bring the following value to the blockchain landscape:
- Data Integrity and Security: DAL ensures that transaction data is readily available and verifiable, ensuring the security and trustworthiness of rollups.
- Improved Scalability: DAL empowers rollups to efficiently process a higher volume of transactions, directly addressing scalability challenges. This advancement paves the way for broader adoption of blockchain technology.
- Cost Efficiency and Speed: with DAL’s support, rollups can significantly reduce transaction costs and enhance processing speed, making blockchain technology more appealing to a broader audience.
- Enhanced User Experience: The combined benefits of increased scalability, security, and efficiency contribute to a better user experience, encouraging more individuals to embrace and engage Web3.
NearDA Solution
The Near Protocol is designed to bring more people to Web3 with plans to onboard over 1 billion users. With the focus on chain abstraction and the paramount goal to ensure the highest user and developer experience, the Near team has rolled out the NearDA DAL.
NearDA offers cost-saving benefits through its innovative approach and technical solutions. Let’s explore how it achieves this:
- Reduced Transaction Costs:
NearDA optimizes data availability by minimizing the number of on-chain transactions. Instead of posting every piece of data directly to the blockchain, NearDA aggregates data into DA blobs. These blobs are then posted to the blockchain, resulting in fewer individual transactions and lower gas fees.
On post-EIP-4844Ethereum, the cost of block creation is 140.53 USD; on Celestia — 0.0.45 USD. It only takes 0.0016 USD to create a block with NearDA.
The figures below show how NearDA helps save money on transaction fees on Arbitrum, Polygon, OP Mainnet (taken from nearmodular.com).
2. Efficient Data Sampling:
NearDA employs efficient data sampling techniques. Rather than posting every single data point, it samples a subset of data, reducing the overall data posting cost while maintaining security.
3. Sharding for Scalability:
NearDA leverages sharding backed by the Nightshade consensus mechanism to enhance scalability. Shards process data in parallel, distributing the load across multiple nodes. As the network grows, additional shards can be added, improving scalability without proportionally increasing costs. This makes the data throughput on NearDA higher than on Ethereum (1.33 mb/s) and Celestia (6.67 mb/s) — 16 mb/s (see figure below).
Near offers a substantial amount of block space per shard for better utilization. Besides, Near optimizes this space by avoiding unnecessary cryptographic bloat, ensuring that each 4 MB allocated equals precisely 4 MB of usable data.
Currently, NearDA doesn’t employ DAS (Data Availability Sampling). The next step after sharding will be stateless validation, allowing for more shards and lower requirements for certain validators.
- Data Pruning:
Old transaction data is deleted due to data pruning every 3–5 epochs, which additionally frees storage space. The same solution is to be found on Aptos and Sui.
2. Separation of Execution and Data Availability:
NearDA separates the execution of smart contracts from data availability. This modular design allows for more efficient resource allocation. By focusing on data availability, NEAR DA ensures cost-effectiveness without compromising security.
3. No security trade-offs:
Some may fear that NearDA achieved high scalability and low transaction costs at the cost of security. In fact, this is not the case. Data is processed on NearDA by 210 validators with a significant stake. Currently, proving data relies on off-chain computational and archival nodes. On the project roadmap, there are plans to adopt zk-proofs on-chain that will also enhance data privacy.
The Pagoda engineering team has built these open-source components for integration to OP Stack, Polygon CDK, or Arbitrum Nitro rollups:
- Blob Store Contract: A contract that provides the store for arbitrary DA blobs;
- Light Client: A trustless off-chain light client for NEAR with DA-enabled features;
- RPC Client: The defacto client for submitting data blobs to NEAR;
- Integrations: Proof of concept works for integrating with L2 rollups.
Staketab is a Professional Staking Provider based in UAE (secured more than $150m TVL https://www.stakingrewards.com/provider/staketab) with extensive experience in offering infrastructure solutions for the Web3 ecosystem for over 3 years. We are seasoned validators operating across more than 40 blockchain networks, ensuring high uptime and 24/7 monitoring.
