Data Availability Is Not Just Storage

Monolithic chains like Ethereum require every node to process every transaction, capping throughput. Scaling solutions like rollups need a secure, cheap place to post their data.

• Bottleneck: Ethereum's base layer is limited to ~15-45 TPS.
• Cost: Storing data on L1 is the primary cost for rollups, often >90% of their fees.

DA layers like Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail provide a marketplace for cheap, scalable data publishing. Rollups post data here, and anyone can verify its availability.

• Throughput: Dedicated DA layers can offer >100 MB/s of data bandwidth.
• Cost Reduction: DA costs can be 10-100x cheaper than equivalent L1 calldata, enabling sub-cent fees.

Light clients can securely verify data availability by randomly sampling small chunks, a breakthrough pioneered by Celestia. This enables trust-minimized bridging without running a full node.

• Trust Assumption: Security scales with the number of light clients, not a single sequencer.
• Efficiency: A light client can verify petabytes of data with ~KB-level downloads.

Specialized execution layers (Fuel VM), SVM rollups (Eclipse), and L3s (Arbitrum Orbit) depend on external DA. This decouples innovation, allowing each layer to optimize for a specific function.

• Specialization: Execution environments are no longer constrained by L1's consensus or DA logic.
• Composability: A shared DA layer creates a unified liquidity and security base for modular chains.

Value accrual shifts from L1 block producers to DA providers and sequencers. This creates new markets and token utility models, as seen with TIA and planned EIGEN distributions.

• New Asset Class: DA becomes a commoditized resource with its own supply/demand dynamics.
• Fee Markets: Independent DA pricing reduces correlation with L1 gas volatility.

With secure DA, rollups become sovereign—they can enforce their own rules and upgrade without L1 permission. This enables hyper-scalable, interoperable ecosystems powered by bridges like LayerZero and Axelar.

• Sovereignty: Chains control their own governance and fork choice rule.
• Interop Foundation: Verifiable DA is the root of trust for cross-chain messaging.

Decouples execution from consensus and data availability, creating a new market for specialized DA.\n- Enables sovereign rollups with their own governance and fork choice.\n- Reduces L2 costs by ~90% vs. posting full data to Ethereum.\n- Scales throughput by orders of magnitude, limited only by bandwidth.

Leverages Ethereum's economic security via restaked ETH to provide high-throughput DA.\n- Inherits Ethereum's $70B+ security from the restaking pool.\n- Optimized for high-volume rollups like Hyperchains with ~10 MB/s throughput.\n- Avoids consensus overhead, focusing purely on data ordering and availability.

Focuses on data availability sampling and light client verification for trust-minimized bridges.\n- Enables efficient validity proofs by guaranteeing data is published.\n- Light clients can verify DA with sub-linear workload, enhancing interoperability.\n- Foundation for a unified Web3 space, connecting rollups and sovereign chains.

Ethereum's EIP-4844 (blobs) created a fee market for DA, commoditizing the base layer.\n- Separate fee market prevents L2 congestion from spiking L1 gas.\n- ~1 cent per blob establishes a new cost baseline for all competitors.\n- Forces DA layers to compete on price, throughput, and security guarantees.

Uses sharding not just for execution but for data availability, baked into L1 design.\n- Horizontal scaling where each shard produces a data chunk for every block.\n- No external DA provider needed, reducing complexity and trust assumptions.\n- Seamless experience for developers building high-frequency dApps.

True DA requires light clients to cheaply verify data is available, not just stored by a few nodes.\n- Data Availability Sampling (DAS) is the key primitive, pioneered by Celestia.\n- Without DAS, you're trusting a committee, reintroducing a trust assumption.\n- The metric that matters is time-to-light-client-verification, not just TB stored.