Avail, a new scaling solution from Polygon that was created for developers, enables them to build application-specific blockchains onto the network.
Developers can build their blockchain applications on top of the main Polygon chain and additional blockchains thanks to the scaling system. Developers would be able to upgrade, fork, and alter how their blockchains handle execution using applications built on Avail.
Anurag Arjun, the chief developer at Avail, told CoinDesk that the new solution would enable access to blockchain data “off-chain,” i.e., developers would not need to retrieve data from the network for an application running on Polygon.
“This is critical for [decentralized finance] and game developers that may need to patch bugs, experiment with execution or just reduce their dependencies on external chains,” Arjun said.
According to him, the tool is designed to address “data availability” issues that scaling apps encounter. This is a complex problem faced by blockchain developers: How are nodes sure about when a new block is produced, all of the data in that block was actually published to the network? There’s no way to detect malicious transactions hidden within that block in case a block producer doesn’t release all of the data of that block.
Avail uses sophisticated mathematical algorithms to evaluate blockchain data provided by node operators to ascertain its legitimacy without having to rely on all node operators to authenticate the data.
“Availability can be determined by only downloading a very small random sample of the total data, effectively solving the data availability problem,” Arjun told CoinDesk.
Currently, due to the overwhelming number of load, Layer-1 blockchains like Ethereum are unable to scale (execution, settlement, and data availability). In order to accelerate transactions, scaling tools like Avail concentrate on just one aspect of the application requests at a time.
Avail can be deployed on any blockchain that is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Developers can use the EVM software platform to build decentralized applications (dapps) on Ethereum.