Avail, headed by a Polygon co-founder, secures $75 million to address Web3 issues such as fragmentation and data availability.
Modular blockchain base layer Avail has secured $75 million through multiple investment rounds, as venture capitalists recognize the urgent need to solve data availability issues across blockchains.
On June 4, Avail successfully closed a $43 million Series A round, which was heavily oversubscribed. This adds to their existing $32 million from previous pre-seed and seed rounds. Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, is committed to using these funds to build a permissionless unification layer for Web3.
“With this new capital, we are set to accelerate our development, expand our global reach, and tackle the most critical challenges facing Web3 today,” said Arjun. As a co-founder of Polygon, he is well-versed in addressing the major challenges within the Web3 ecosystem: blockchain fragmentation, insufficient data availability (DA), and limited scalability.
In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Arjun detailed how Avail DA resolves data availability issues by moving data off-chain and verifying its availability. This is achieved through the use of validity proofs, erasure coding, light clients, and data availability sampling (DAS).
“Unlike monolithic blockchain designs that reduce block space as demand increases, Avail’s DA layer can scale block space with demand, effectively future-proofing appchains and rollups,” Arjun explained.
The comeback of crypto VC funding
The Series A funding attracted major venture capital (VC) firms and angel investors, including Altos Ventures, Alliance DAO, Hashkey, Elixir Capital, Spark Digital Capital, and RW3 Ventures, among others.
Avail is driving blockchain unification to foster partnerships and collaborations with other Web3 players. Its technology allows developers to build and scale modern blockchain applications efficiently by spinning up a new rollup instead of creating a separate layer 1.
Arjun told Cointelegraph that the proliferation of layer-1 and layer-2 blockchains can harm the space due to fragmentation and user confusion. He emphasized that VCs are drawn to Avail’s vision of unification and the significant issues their technology addresses.
The rollups inherit security from Avail’s base layer, and the project aims to enhance this security further by enabling the restaking of multiple cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ether.
Web3 unification use case
Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, emphasized the simplicity of creating new protocols with Avail’s technology stack.
“Avail revolutionizes data availability—a historically expensive challenge for blockchains—by making it significantly cheaper and more efficient with their cutting-edge, custom-built approach.”
Avail’s roadmap features the development of Avail Nexus, a unification layer based on Avail DA to enhance cross-rollup operability, and Fusion Security, designed to ensure unified and shared security across the Avail ecosystem.