What is an Avail RPC Node?
Access modular DA infrastructure
An Avail RPC node provides applications with access to modular data availability infrastructure enabling rollups, validiums, and modular blockchains to publish transaction data efficiently and verifiably. Avail focuses exclusively on ensuring data is available and retrievable — the DA layer in modular architecture — while leaving execution, consensus, and settlement to other specialized layers. This separation enables optimization impossible in monolithic designs where all concerns compete for the same resources.
Why data availability is critical
Rollups and validiums need to publish transaction data somewhere so anyone can reconstruct state and verify correctness. Posting data to expensive Layer 1s like Ethereum creates scalability bottlenecks. Avail provides dedicated, scalable DA through validity proofs and light client sampling, enabling applications to verify data availability without downloading everything. This creates the foundation for truly scalable modular blockchain architectures.
Avail advantages:
- Data availability sampling — verify without full download
- Validity proofs — KZG commitments ensure data correctness
- Light clients — resource-efficient DA verification
- Scalable — purpose-built for DA without execution overhead
- Modular — specialized DA layer for modular architecture
- Cost effective — cheaper than posting to expensive L1s
Data availability sampling explained
Data Availability Sampling (DAS) is Avail's breakthrough technology enabling light clients to verify data availability by randomly sampling small portions of blocks rather than downloading everything. Through erasure coding extending block data with redundancy and KZG polynomial commitments proving data correctness, Avail ensures that if enough random samples are available, the complete data must exist and be retrievable. This provides cryptographic security without requiring resource-intensive full node operation.
How DAS works on Avail:
- Block data extended with erasure coding for redundancy
- KZG polynomial commitments created for data chunks
- Light clients randomly sample small data portions
- Multiple samples provide statistical confidence of availability
- If samples verify, full data provably exists and retrievable
- Security achieved without downloading complete blocks
Foundation for modular blockchains
Avail provides the data availability layer enabling modular blockchain designs where different specialized layers handle execution (rollups), settlement (base chains), consensus (validator sets), and DA (Avail). This separation allows each component to optimize independently — rollups maximize execution throughput, Avail maximizes DA scalability, settlement layers focus on security. This modular approach represents the evolution beyond monolithic blockchain designs toward specialized, composable infrastructure.
This infrastructure powers the next generation of scalable, modular blockchain architectures.