Data Availability Layer: The Cornerstone of the Web3 Era

With the deepening development of the data economy, everyone inevitably participates in various data storage activities. The arrival of the Web3 era is driving upgrades and transformations in the technology sector, and decentralized storage, as an important infrastructure, is expected to be implemented in more application scenarios in the future. For example, the data storage networks behind social data, short videos, live streaming, and smart cars may adopt decentralized storage models in the future.

In the Web3 era, data is the core asset, and users owning data is its main characteristic. Ensuring that users safely own the data and the assets it represents, while alleviating ordinary users' concerns about asset security, will help attract the next billion users into the Web3 world. In this ecosystem, an independent data availability layer will play an indispensable role.

From Decentralized Storage to Data Availability Layer

Traditionally, data has been stored in a centralized manner, completely housed on centralized servers. However, as users' concerns about personal information security and data storage needs have increased, especially following data breach incidents involving some large data operators, the drawbacks of centralized storage have gradually become evident. The advancement of the Web3 era has diversified data, continuously expanding its scale, and the dimensions of personal online data have become more comprehensive and valuable, making data security and privacy even more important.

Decentralized data storage has emerged. It is one of the earliest and most关注的 infrastructures in the Web3 field. Decentralized storage follows the principles of the sharing economy, utilizing massive edge storage devices to provide services, with data actually stored on the storage provided by Provider nodes. In this model, project parties cannot control this data, and users can control their own data, thereby increasing the security of the data.

Decentralized storage mainly stores files or sets of files in shards across storage space through distributed storage. It addresses many pain points of centralized cloud storage in Web2, aligns better with the development needs of the big data era, and enables the storage of unstructured edge data at a lower cost and higher efficiency, empowering emerging technologies.

Data availability (DA) refers to the ability of light nodes to ensure data availability and accuracy efficiently without participating in consensus, without the need to store all data or maintain the entire network state in real time. An independent data availability layer effectively avoids single points of failure and maximizes data security.

In addition, Layer 2 scaling solutions such as zkRollup also require the use of a data availability layer. Layer 2 relies on Layer 1 as the consensus layer, and in addition to updating the status of batched transaction results to Layer 1, it also needs to ensure the availability of the original transaction data. Storing data in a dedicated data availability layer, while only recording the Merkle root of the computations on this data in the consensus layer, is a more reasonable design and an inevitable trend in the long run.

Analysis of Independent Data Availability Layer

Celestia

Celestia provides an independent DA public chain with a series of validator nodes, block producers, and consensus mechanisms to enhance security levels. Layer 2 publishes transaction data to the Celestia main chain, where the validators of Celestia sign the Merkle Root of the DA Attestation and send it to the DA Bridge Contract on the Ethereum main chain for verification and storage. This approach significantly reduces overhead.

Celestia uses an optimistic proof mechanism, which is very efficient when the network is operating normally. Light nodes only need to receive data and recover it according to the encoding; the entire process is very efficient when there are no issues.

MEMO

MEMO is a next-generation, high-capacity, highly available enterprise-level storage network built by aggregating global edge storage devices through algorithmic features. It is based on blockchain peer-to-peer technology, enabling decentralized, multi-to-multi storage operations. The MEMO main chain holds smart contracts that constrain all nodes, controlling key operations such as data upload, storage node matching, system operation, and punishment mechanisms.

MEMO utilizes erasure coding and data recovery technologies to enhance storage functionality, improve data security, and increase download efficiency. It introduces the Keeper role to prevent nodes from malicious attacks, maintaining economic balance through mutual checks among multiple roles. MEMO is capable of supporting high-capacity and high-availability enterprise-level commercial storage applications, providing secure and reliable cloud storage services for NFT, GameFi, DeFi, SocialFi, etc., and is compatible with Web2, making it a perfect integration of blockchain and cloud storage.

In conclusion, an independent data availability layer, as an important infrastructure of Web3, will play a key role in the future digital economy, providing users with more secure and efficient data storage and management solutions.