Avail, a modular blockchain base layer, has successfully raised $75 million in various investment rounds as venture capitalists recognize the importance of addressing data availability challenges in the blockchain industry.
On June 4, Avail concluded a heavily oversubscribed Series A funding round, securing $43 million. This comes in addition to the $32 million it had previously raised through pre-seed and seed rounds. Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, intends to allocate these funds towards the development of a permissionless unification layer for Web3.
Arjun, who is also a co-founder of Polygon, leads Avail in tackling three key obstacles within the Web3 ecosystem: blockchain fragmentation, limited scalability, and insufficient data availability (DA).
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Arjun explained how Avail DA resolves data availability issues by moving data off-chain and ensuring its availability through validity proofs, erasure coding, light clients, and data availability sampling (DAS).
The Series A funding round attracted participation from major venture capital firms and angel investors, including Altos Ventures, Alliance DAO, Hashkey, Elixir Capital, Spark Digital Capital, and RW3 Ventures, among others.
Avail aims to establish partnerships and collaborations with other Web3 players through its efforts in blockchain unification. Developers can leverage Avail’s capability to create and scale modern blockchain applications by establishing a new rollup instead of building a separate layer 1.
Arjun emphasized that the proliferation of layer-1 and layer-2 blockchains can have negative consequences for the industry, leading to fragmentation and confusion among users. He believes that venture capitalists are drawn to Avail’s vision of unification and the solutions it offers for the challenges mentioned above.
To enhance security, Avail’s rollups inherit security measures from its base layer. The project plans to further strengthen security by allowing the staking of multiple cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).
One of the venture capital firms participating in the funding round, Founders Fund, praised Avail’s technology stack for making it easy to create new protocols.
Avail’s future plans include the development of Avail Nexus, a unification layer built on Avail DA to enhance cross-rollup operability, as well as Fusion Security, which aims to ensure unified and shared security across the Avail ecosystem.