Data Availability Improving the scalability of a blockchain | House Of Chimera

Data Availability

Improving the scalability of a blockchain is crucial, but it often comes at the expense of either security or decentralization . Rollups are a promising solution that should increase scalability without significant drawbacks. However, they can create issues with Data Availability (DA), a fundamental task of a blockchain. DA guarantees that all available data for a block has been published and made accessible to all network participants. The scaling methods' challenge is securing DA while preventing a significant data overhead.

Generally, there are two approaches to DA: on-chain and off-chain. On-chain DA is popular with monolithic blockchains , as all tasks are performed on a single layer. ZK-rollups, in particular, utilize on-chain DA, where layer 2 posts transactional data on the main chain as a data layer. This approach has the highest security quality , as all the transferred data to the main chain is immutable. However, the drawback is that it's impossible to avoid call data gas costs .

As a blockchain gets longer, it becomes more resource-intensive, requiring more storage and resources to participate. To reduce costs, it's possible to store data off-chain, but this could lead to trust issues and DA problems. However, there are solutions for the resource-inefficient on-chain method.

One of them is Proof-of-Data availability, which you can learn about in the upcoming post.

Stay tuned!