Sophon Selects Avail as Its Data Availability Layer

We are excited to announce that Sophon has chosen Avail DA as its data availability (DA) layer.

Designed with a user-centric philosophy, Sophon reimagines onchain entertainment by prioritizing unparalleled user experiences. Central to this vision is the need for a robust and scalable DA solution.

The Challenge

All entertainment platforms, digital or IRL, thrive on a low latency & high throughput environment to deliver rich user experiences. Traditional blockchain architectures, while secure, often fall short of meeting these demands. The inherent limitations of Layer 1 blockchains create bottlenecks that impede widespread adoption. While Layer 2 solutions like Validiums offer a path to increased scalability, they also introduce new challenges. Maintaining data availability and ensuring transaction integrity while keeping costs manageable is a complex task. For a platform like Sophon, these challenges are magnified.

At its core, DA refers to block producers publishing all transaction data to the network, allowing validators to download and verify it. This seemingly simple concept is fundamental to the security and efficiency of any blockchain system.

The DA problem consists of two crucial aspects:

1. Security
2. Cost

Currently, most Layer 2 solutions rely on Ethereum for both settlement and DA. While this approach leverages Ethereum's robust security, it comes at a significant cost. Layer 2 sequencers publish their status data and transaction data on Ethereum, incurring substantial expenses due to Ethereum's high gas fees.

This creates quite a dilemma. On one hand, chains need to ensure that all transaction data is available and verifiable to maintain the integrity of the system. On the other hand, the cost of publishing this data on Ethereum can be prohibitively expensive, especially for high-throughput applications.

Being a Validium, Sophon had to pick a DA that could scale to meet its expectations towards transactional volume (and data) and be aligned with its security standards. On top of that, Sophon wanted something that brings customizability and extensibility, allowing it to leverage its community of Sophon Guardians to participate in securing the network.

After much consideration, Sophon has chosen Avail as its DA layer.

Why Avail 

Off-chain transactions and the reliance on L1 for security necessitate a robust DA solution. Avail directly addresses these issues by providing an efficient and scalable off-chain DA mechanism.  Avail's approach to DA aligns perfectly with Sophon’s vision for a scalable, secure, and developer-friendly entertainment ecosystem.

Key factors in our decision include:

1. Trust-minimized security: Avail employs a robust consensus framework combining BABE (Block Production), GRANDPA (Finality), and Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS). This hybrid approach ensures network resilience against temporary partitions and node failures. BABE determines block proposers, while GRANDPA provides swift finality. NPoS allows token holders to nominate up to 16 validators, promoting decentralization and fair workload distribution among elected validators. Uniquely, Avail can leverage its light client P2P network for data sampling during disruptions, reducing reliance on full nodes and enhancing overall network security.
2. Future-proof scalability: Avail's modular design allows for dynamic scaling as demand increases. By incorporating light clients with Data Availability Sampling (DAS), Avail can expand block sizes in response to rising demand without affecting applications built on top. Its data-agnostic design supports a variety of execution environments (EVM, WASM, custom), ensuring Sophon remains adaptable. Looking ahead, Avail’s support for KZG commitments makes it well-suited for zero-knowledge constructions.
3. Cost-effectiveness: By separating DA from execution, Avail keeps operational costs low.
4. Performance: Avail's architecture allows for efficient block production and finalization. Through internal benchmarking, Avail has tested block sizes up to 128MB without difficulty.
5. Extensibility: With the possibility to extend the Avail Light Client, Sophon is taking an innovative approach in creating the Sophon Light Nodes, a lightweight software that can be run by Sophon Guardians. The main goal for such nodes is to initially ensure DA is fully available in the Avail network but will evolve to perform other relevant work for the Sophon network, leveraging the ability to create a subnetwork that indexes only relevant data for the platform.

Looking Ahead

Sophon is here to change how people interact onchain. By integrating Avail, users and developers can expect near-instant transactions with subsecond completion times and low, predictable fees. As a result, microtransactions become viable, opening up new avenues for in-game economies, content monetization, and much more.

The crypto industry stands at a crossroads of adoption. Sophon, a modular rollup leveraging the ZK Stack and secured by Avail, is leading the charge toward a more engaging onchain future. We invite all creators and users to join us in shaping this exciting landscape.

About Avail

Avail is led by Polygon’s former co-founder Anurag Arjun and is building a unification layer to solve rollup fragmentation at scale. Avail addresses this from first principles solving blockchain scalability with Avail DA, a foundational DA layer that implements the same technology planned for Ethereum’s danksharding roadmap, including KZG Commitments and Data Availability Sampling (DAS). Avail Nexus addresses growing fragmentation concerns with permissionless interoperability, leveraging proof aggregation on Avail’s scalable DA layer. Avail’s security is then reinforced with multi-asset staking through Avail Fusion. Start your unification journey today at availproject.org.

About Sophon

Sophon is an intuitive ecosystem for entertainment applications designed to enrich the digital world – in gaming, social, art, AI, prediction markets, and beyond. With the grand vision of changing how users live, play, create, and connect in the internet economy, Sophon is laser-focused on creating seamless customer experiences.

Technically, Sophon is built as a modular rollup (Validium) leveraging the ZK Stack, tailored for high throughput applications. Read more in our docs.

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