TIAs new high has ignited the DA narrative. What other potential projects are there on the DA track?

Original author: Nancy, PANews

Recently, as Celestia prices continue to rise, the data availability (DA) layer has become a popular crypto narrative. Especially in anticipation of the upcoming upgrade of Ethereum in Cancun, the concept of modular blockchain has attracted much attention and is unanimously considered by the market to be one of the main themes of investment in 2024. In this article, PANews takes stock of 7 potential projects in the DA track. They adopt different types of data processing solutions, each with their own advantages in terms of scalability, decentralization, and security.

Celestia（TIA）

Celestia is the first modular blockchain project focused on data availability. It aims to simplify blockchain deployment by providing a pluggable consensus network, allowing anyone to quickly deploy decentralized blockchains at minimal cost. . Celestia has completed two rounds of funding, including a $1.5 million seed round led by Binance Labs and a $55 million Series A/B round led by Polychain and Bain Capital.

TIA is Celestia’s native token and is used for gas fees, node staking and governance. It has attracted much attention due to the genesis airdrop that will be launched in September 2023. Recently, many projects, including the modular blockchain project Dymension, the layer 2 project Hypr Network, and the Cosmos ecological scalability protocol Saga, have begun airdropping to Celestia. Mintscan data shows that as of January 16, Celestia’s total number of transactions exceeded 9.849 million, and the APR for staking native TIA tokens reached 16.07%.

CoinGecko data shows that as of January 16, TIA’s token price was approximately US$18.85, with an increase of 47.7% in the past 30 days, and the circulating market value exceeded US$2.96 billion.

EigenDA (not issued yet)

EigenDA is a data availability middleware product developed by the re-pledge protocol EigenLayer, aiming to reduce the cost of Ethereum Layer 2 Rollup data storage. EigenDA is also the first Active Verification Service (AVS) launched on EigenLayer. Re-stakeholders will be able to entrust their pledge rights to node operators that perform verification tasks for EigenDA in exchange for service payments, and Rollup can publish data to EigenDA to obtain Lower transaction costs and higher transaction throughput and security. EigenLayer has also completed two rounds of financing, a $14.5 million seed round led by Polychain Capital and Ethereal Ventures, and a $50 million Series A round led by Blockchain Capital.

Although EigenLayer has not yet confirmed whether it will issue tokens, market expectations for its airdrop are very high. According to EigenLayer’s early planning, it will be launched in three phases. Currently, EigenLayer has launched the second phase of EigenLayer and EigenDA testnets and is expected to launch the mainnet in the first half of 2024. The third phase will enter the testnet and mainnet in 2024.

Avail (not issued yet)

Avail is a modular blockchain solution for the data availability layer launched by Polygon Labs in late 2020 and spun off into an independent entity in March last year. and techniques such as erasure coding to achieve greater scalability and address data availability trust issues. Previously, Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun and head of research Prabal Banerjee both joined Avail after leaving the company.

In November 2023, Avail announced the launch of the Clash of Nodes incentivized testnet and is expected to launch the mainnet in early 2024.

NEAR DA（NEAR）

EAR DA is a DA layer solution announced by the NEAR Foundation in November 2023. It aims to help Ethereum rollup builders simplify their networks and reduce costs. The cost of data release in NEAR DA is 8,000 times lower than on Ethereum. First users include StarkNets Madara, Caldera, Fluent, Vistara, Dymension RollApps and Movement Labs.

CoinGecko data shows that as of January 16, the price of NEAR tokens was approximately US$3.24, with an increase of approximately 35.5% in the past 30 days, and the circulating market value exceeded US$3.294 billion.

StarkEx (STRK, not online)

StarkEx is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution developed by the StarkWare team and also provides multiple data availability modes: Rollup, Validium and Volition. Among them, Validium serves as StarkEx’s off-chain DA solution, and data security is maintained by the Data Availability Committee (DAC).

zkPorter (not issued yet)

zkPorter is an off-chain data availability solution optimized for decentralization launched by zkSync, the Ethereum expansion solution. It handles data availability through a hybrid method that combines zkRollup and sharding ideas. zkPorter introduces an optional validator mechanism where zkSync token holders stake their tokens to later verify and sign blocks. Although the product progress of zkPorter has not been disclosed to the outside world for a long time, judging from the fact that the Layer 3 application chain GRVT on zkSync is scheduled to go online in Q1 this year, and the project stores data on zkPorter, zkPorter has been speculated by the outside world. Or will start before then.

Covalent EWM（CQT）

Covalent, a blockchain data query service platform, can standardize data from multiple blockchains, and its unified API allows developers to reuse queries in supported networks, solving the problem of difficulty in obtaining blockchain data. In November 2023, Covalent launched the long-term data availability layer service Ethereum Wayback Machine (EWM, Ethereum Wayback Machine) to permanently save Layer 2 state data discarded by Ethereum. As of December 2023, Covalent supports more than 210 blockchains and plans to support more than 1,000 blockchains by the end of 2024.

According to the Covalent data availability report released by Messari not long ago, Covalent has billions of data and is currently the most suitable to provide services for applications that require general and widely applicable data.

CoinGecko data shows that as of January 16, CQT’s token price was approximately US$0.23, with an increase of approximately 9.9% in the past 30 days, and the circulating market value exceeded US$147 million.