With the soaring popularity of Celestia, modular blockchains have recently received a great deal of attention, highlighting the importance of data availability layers in reducing costs and scalability for blockchains like Ethereum. The current focus is on Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail – who will be the ultimate winner? This article is sourced from the book by Bridget Harris and compiled, organized, and written by Block Beats.
Table of Contents:
Introduction to Data Availability Sampling (DAS)
The Battle of Avail, EigenDA, and Celestia in the DA Ecosystem
How do the projects view this?
The Data Availability Layer (DA) has become an important component of modular architectures, serving as a plug-in component to reduce costs and expand the scalability of the suite blockchain (the core function of the DA layer is to ensure that data on the chain is available to all network participants for use and access).
Historically, each node had to download all transaction data to verify data availability – an inefficient and costly task. But this is how most blockchains currently work, and it is a barrier to scalable suites because the amount of data required for verification increases linearly with block size.
End users suffer losses here: data availability costs account for 90% of the transaction costs generated by users on Rollup (the current cost of sending transaction data to Ethereum is $1,300-1,600/mb).
The introduction of Data Availability Sampling (DAS) fundamentally changes this architecture. With DAS, light nodes can confirm data availability through multi-round random sampling of block data without having to download the entire block.
Once the multi-round sampling is completed and a certain confidence threshold for data availability is reached, the rest of the transaction process can proceed safely. In this way, the chain can expand its block size while maintaining simple data availability verification. And it also achieves significant cost savings: these emerging layers can reduce DA costs by up to 99%.
A very appropriate analogy of DA in 0xngmi
In addition to achieving higher throughput, the data availability layer is also meaningful for improving interoperability. Cheap DAs will inevitably drive the explosion of new custom Rollup chains, making deployments increasingly easy through Rollup-as-a-service providers such as Caldera, AltLayer, and Conduit.
However, with the emergence of L2 and L3 ecosystems, they are expected to become fragmented. It is already difficult for users to adopt new platforms – and if interoperability, liquidity, and network effects are limited, the situation will become even worse. A unified DA layer as the foundation of each network would make capital flow simpler and attract a wider range of users.
Caldera and other RaaS providers will allow projects to choose the DA layer when building custom aggregations
Avail, EigenDA, and Celestia are the protagonists in the DA ecosystem – each serving the same space but taking slightly different approaches in terms of infrastructure stack, implementation, and listing.
In terms of technical architecture, Avail, Ethereum, and EigenDA adopt KZG commitments, while Celestia adopts fraud proofs to verify the correctness of block encoding. Generating KZG proofs, although a very rigorous approach to data availability, brings more computational costs to block producers, especially as block size increases. On the other hand, Celestia assumes that data can be implicitly obtained through its anti-fraud scheme.
As an unfinished computation “job”, the system must wait for a period of time to go through the fraud proof dispute period before nodes can confirm that the block has been accurately encoded. Both KZG proofs and fraud proofs have undergone rapid technological progress, and their trade-offs may become more complex, and it is currently unclear which mechanism will be strictly superior to the other.
For Avail, they adopted the architecture of KZG commitments, making it very suitable for zk structures. If zk dominates in the future and Celestia relies on optimistic fraud proofs, this may pose a challenge for Celestia. Furthermore, even if all full nodes fail, Avail’s P2P light client network can still support the network, while in Celestia’s architecture, light clients cannot operate without full nodes. Avail and Celestia both use erasure codes under DAS (distributed storage) to divide data into fragments, increase redundancy, and allow data to be reconstructed for verification.
Compared to the technical stack of Celestia and Avail, EigenDA fully leverages the existing infrastructure of Ethereum. If data needs to be sent to Rollup contracts to prove its availability, EigenDA will inherit the same finality time as Ethereum. If Rollup fully adopts EigenLayer, finality can be achieved more quickly.
To achieve consensus, Avail adopts BABE + GRANDPA inherited from Polkadot’s SDK, while using NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake). NPoS is used to nominate a set of validators that delegators hope to see elected, while BABE specifies who proposes the next block, and GRANDPA acts as the block finality algorithm.
Celestia uses Tendermint as the consensus mechanism, allowing users to stake their TIA for validator staking rewards. Although Celestia can achieve fast finality through Tendermint, there is a waiting period for actual data availability guarantees (users need time to submit fraud proofs) due to its optimistic architecture.
EigenDA itself does not have consensus but has two mechanisms to ensure the effectiveness of data availability:
Proof of custody: This is essentially an economic security mechanism that ensures nodes store data but does not actually guarantee that the data is provided to everyone in the network. If nodes do not comply, they will be slashed, for example, if they cannot prove ownership of the data.
Sufficient decentralization: Ensuring that the operator set remains decentralized and resistant to collusion is crucial for the normal operation of the network. With a large and independent set of validators, data provisioning becomes a competition, and many market participants are willing to join. At this scale, collusion becomes extremely difficult.
An interesting point to note is that Celestia’s active validator set consists of the top 100 validators with the most staked tokens, and this threshold may be lowered in the future. In addition, each of their validators stores the entire dataset.
EigenDA optimizes each node (potentially millions) that stores a small portion of the data, so if enough nodes are honest, the data can be reconstructed. The complete origin of EigenDA (and more details) can be found in Sreeram’s recent post.
Finally, Avail provides a helpful comparison of the core components of the main DA layers.
New discussions have also emerged about the trade-offs of each design. David Hoffman points out that Celestia is a complete blockchain in itself – a complex stack that requires more than just pure DA. On the other hand, EigenDA is just a set of smart contracts, but it relies on Ethereum, while Celestia and Avail do not.
The Celestia team believes that tokens are necessary for security, and EigenDA will eventually need tokens because it is impossible to reduce the availability of on-chain data. They believe that in order to ensure that nodes are honest, data is available, and malicious nodes are punished, the network must be able to verify through incentive structures, including native tokens. Here, Nick White of Celestia raises criticism of EigenDA.
From a branding perspective, EigenDA is a product that is highly consistent with Ethereum. The EigenLayer team is building it based on EIP-4844 and danksharding – as Sreeram puts it, EigenDA is being built as the “one ETH-centric data availability layer”. He explains that by definition, a data availability layer is a modular product, but other DA “Layers” are actually blockchains themselves.
Packaging the DA layer into the blockchain does bring significant benefits to Rollups running natively on it, primarily in the form of security guarantees. However, Sreeram mentions that the goal of building EigenDA is to create a product that provides data availability services to the Ethereum ecosystem from first principles – a true “Layer” adjacent to the Ethereum ecosystem. He points out that separate consensus is not needed here since Ethereum-based Rollups already rely on the network for ordering and consensus (Sreeram explains this on a recent Bankless podcast).
Avail adopts Validity Proofs and DAS constructions, enabling high flexibility and interoperability in the ecosystem. Their architecture lays the foundation for a scalable suite framework designed to support services across multiple platforms. This “agnostic” position allows for greater interoperability and capital flow, and it also attracts non-Ethereum-centric ecosystems.
The ultimate goal here is to extract ordered transaction data from all chains and aggregate them in Avail, making it the coordination center for all web3. To kickstart the network, Avail recently launched node conflict activities alongside its incentive testnet, allowing users to run validators and light clients and participate in network challenges.
The Celestia ecosystem consists of RaaS providers, shared sequencers, cross-chain infrastructure, etc., covering ecosystems such as Ethereum, Ethereum rollups, Cosmos, and Osmosis.
Each of these design choices, whether technical or marketing, comes with interesting trade-offs. Personally, I am not sure if the data availability category will be a winner-takes-all or commoditized market – instead, there may be an oligopoly market where projects choose the DA layer that best suits their needs.
Depending on the type of protocol, teams can optimize for interoperability, security, or preferences for a particular ecosystem or community. If custom use case aggregations are expected to explode in growth, they will not hesitate to integrate the DA layer – and there will be more than one strong option to choose from.
This technology – and the overall modular narrative – is still relatively new, with Celestia just recently going live, and Avail and EigenDA will enter the mainnet in the coming months.
However, the technological advancements in modularism have been remarkable so far (many of these concepts were just ideas a few years ago!). By fundamentally improving how we build and use blockchains, the DA layer will undoubtedly become one of the core technologies of this cycle and beyond.
Related reports:
Celestia vs Cosmos: Comparing core architectures, application scenarios, and token value
How important is “data availability” to Layer 2, inseparable from the Ethereum mainnet?
Single-chain vs. modular blockchain: Ethereum, Solana, and Celestia competing landscape next steps?