Five factors of modular DA design: Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA, who is the winner?

Five factors include data availability sampling, consensus + DA guarantee, degree of decentralization, scalability, and cost.

Author: hitesh.eth, Crypto KOL

Translation: Felix, PANews

Arbitrum paid about $1980/MB for DA fees last month. Meanwhile, Manta only paid $3.41/MB using Celestia DA. A modular DA layer can save a lot of gas fees for Rollups. Celestia, Avail, or EigenDA… who will win the DA battle?

Why do we need modular DA?

In a holistic blockchain like Ethereum, data availability (DA) is often part of the design of a single system. When block space utilization is high, data availability becomes a bottleneck limiting its development. The higher the gas fee, the worse the user experience.

Ethereum has also been aware of the scaling problem for many years and has begun to explore various off-chain scaling solutions. Rollups, especially OP Rollups, have become popular off-chain scaling solutions in recent years, but they still face the problem of high gas fees when block space demand is high.

Another problem that Rollups face is that they spend almost 70-90% of their income on calling data and storing Ethereum DA.

Modular data availability layer is one of the potential solutions to reduce DA costs, which can reduce costs by up to 99%.

This has been confirmed on Celestia and Manta. By choosing Celestia instead of Ethereum DA, Manta successfully saved nearly 99% of DA costs. Although Ethereum is also undergoing major upgrades, it will introduce separate block space for L2 calling data.

It is estimated that calling data costs can be reduced by 5-10 times. But even when compared with Proto Dank Sharding (EIP-4844), Celestia still has at least a 50x advantage over Blobspace.

The current question is, what factors have been considered in the design of modular DAs like Celestia, Avail, and EigenLayer to reduce the publishing cost of calling data to such a low level?

There are many factors that affect the overall performance and cost of the DA layer. Crypto KOL hitesh.eth believes that the following five are the most important:

Data Availability Sampling (DAS)
Consensus + DA guarantee
Degree of decentralization
Scalability
Cost

Data Availability Sampling

In Ethereum DA, nodes traverse all the data in the block to check if the data is available, which not only takes a lot of time but also increases costs. In data availability sampling, light nodes can verify the availability of data without downloading it.

Modular DAs like Celestia and Avail use technologies such as erasure coding to divide data into small shards and allow light nodes to randomly select a subset of shards for download and verification.

Celestia also uses Namespaced Merkle trees (NMT), allowing Rollups to only publish relevant parts of the data to Celestia blocks, helping to reduce the cost of light node storage and verification. EigenDA does not use data availability sampling.

Consensus + Data Guarantee

When discussing reducing data availability costs, consensus plays its own role. It consists of two parts: transactions should be added to blocks faster, and the accuracy of transactions should be guaranteed.

So, the block finalization time plus the data guarantee time will play their respective roles in optimizing the performance of the DA layer. Celestia uses Tendermint, which is faster in block finalization time and also uses anti-fraud design to determine the accuracy of transactions.

On the other hand, Avail uses a hybrid consensus mechanism inherited from the Polkadot SDK (Grandpa and Babe), which has a slower block finalization time compared to Tendermint. But because Avail also uses KZG commitments for validity proof, the speed of verifying transaction accuracy is faster than Celestia.

EigenDA uses Ethereum's Casper proof of stake consensus, which is slower than the other consensus discussed above. EigenDA uses DAC for the verification process; DAC is a committee of validators responsible for the verification process.

The Data Availability Committee (DAC) saves verification time but also brings centralization risks. Using DAC can also effectively reduce DA costs, as demonstrated by Metis and other validity solutions.

Decentralization

The degree of decentralization is one of the most important aspects of the design factor. The degree of decentralization refers to how many validators are protecting the network and the distribution of stakes across the entire network. Celestia supports up to 100 validators.

Avail uses designated proof of stake and supports up to 1000 validators. Even if most full nodes go offline, it can still operate because they are sampled from the light node's p2p network. Avail is the only DA layer with a strong fault-tolerant mechanism.

EigenDA is an active verification service (AVS), which shares security by locking and staking ETH on smart contracts from Ethereum validators. EigenDA's security guarantee will depend on the number of validators and the amount of ETH staked.

Scalability

The modular layer should have the ability to dynamically scale block sizes as demand increases. Celestia and Avail use large blocks, data availability sampling, and light nodes to meet growing demands. The DAC used by EigenDA is also considered scalable.

Cost

The cost of modular DA depends on the various factors discussed above. Celestia DA is now live and currently charges $3.41/MB to Manta; the cost will also vary with the price of TIA. Avail and EigenDA have not yet gone live, and NEAR DA has the lowest cost.

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