DA Layer "Battle of the Three Kingdoms": Analysis of the advantages and differentiated development directions of Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA. Who will dominate the DA market?

The current Data Availability (DA) layers (Celestia, Avail, EigenDA) will long-term split the market in different directions, similar to the ancient "Three Kingdoms" scenario, each focusing on their own areas of advantage.

Written by: c4lvin, Four Pillars

Compiled by: Glendon, Techub News

Key Points:

• The current data availability (DA) layers (Celestia, Avail, EigenDA) will long split the market in different directions, similar to the ancient "Three Kingdoms" situation, each focusing on different areas of advantage.
• In the short term, the three DA layers are competing to increase their throughput, and the outcome of this performance battle may determine which project will dominate the DA market in the long run.
• This article will explore the three main DA layer projects: Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA. Despite their similar technologies, they are developing in different ways.

The current comparison of DA cannot reflect the future roadmap.

Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA have many commonalities in their business domains. Starting with Celestia, followed by Avail and EigenDA, they emerged around the same time and currently target highly overlapping markets. Furthermore, shortly after the rise of DA, Ethereum's Dencun upgrade introduced blobspace (an extremely cheap data storage space), which somewhat undermined the narrative value of DA.

Currently, Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA seem to share the market in different overlapping areas, which has led to many technical comparative analyses on "how to choose a DA layer:"

Although many researchers have thoroughly explained the technical status of these projects, in the long run, the three projects will head in different directions. Ultimately, it is expected that each DA layer will find solutions that match its characteristics, just as the "Wei, Shu, and Wu" divided their spheres of influence during the Three Kingdoms period.

This article will explore the development goals of these three major DA layer projects and their future differentiated development paths.

Background: Data Availability

What is data availability?

Data availability refers to the proof that certain specific data exists on the network. Why is such proof needed?

In the consensus process of blockchain, new blocks are usually propagated to nodes by a leader, and nodes need to verify whether the blocks transmitted by the leader are consistent with the blocks actually submitted by the network. Without independent verification, consensus may be manipulated by a malicious leader hiding fraudulent transactions.

This logic also applies to L2. The sequencer ensures data visibility by propagating data to full nodes, in which case a process is needed to verify whether the received blocks match the blocks actually submitted to the network.

Source: rollup.wtf

The simplest way to verify is to directly check the status of the chain. However, as shown in the figure above, submitting data to networks like Ethereum is very inefficient in terms of cost and speed. The emergence of the DA layer is precisely to optimize this process.

What factors should projects considering adopting the DA protocol pay attention to? ###

First is security. Since the DA layer introduces additional trust anchors, if the DA layer is delayed or unable to provide verification, the Optimium, which lacks an independent data availability mechanism, may encounter data unavailability issues. To address this problem, the DA layer will adopt a separate consensus process or introduce Data Availability Sampling (DAS) technology, allowing users to verify data integrity through lightweight clients.

Secondly, DA must provide sufficient performance. With Ethereum significantly improving its own DA efficiency by adding blobspace through the Dencun upgrade, the DA layer must offer performance far exceeding that of Ethereum in terms of cost and throughput in order to attract project adoption.

What types of DA protocols currently exist?

Mainstream options include Ethereum, Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA. Not all chains require external DA. According to L2 BEAT data, more than half of the Optimium/Validium blockchains use a multi-signature based DA, known as "DAC (Data Availability Committee)"; in this case, data availability is considered to be quite centralized.

Comparison of DA Protocols

Source: Avail Blog

Below is the comparison presented in the "Guide to Choosing the Right Data Availability Layer:"

• EigenDA: The highest throughput. However, it has been criticized for not achieving this key drawback due to economic security. Recently, it has started to provide economic security guarantees through a slashing mechanism update. Additionally, because it chooses to adopt a DAC structure instead of an independent network, it has lower security compared to other consensus-based DA protocols.
• Avail: The slowest block time is 20 seconds, but the final confirmation speed is quite fast, only 40 seconds. It supports about 1000 validators and supports client verification through DAS to enhance security.
• Celestia: Provides a short block time of 6 seconds and high throughput. It guarantees single-slot finality (SSF), which allows for very good compatibility between rollups using Celestia. However, for rollups that do not adopt single-slot finality, approximately a 10-minute challenge period is needed to ensure finality.

In summary, EigenDA offers very high throughput, Avail provides a higher degree of decentralization compared to other DAs, and Celestia offers high scalability for rollups within its ecosystem, all of which distinguish it from Ethereum.

Current Status of DA

As the DA market is expected to be segmented into multiple fields in the future, observing the projects that have already integrated protocols is more reflective of the current market landscape than looking at the prices of related protocol tokens.

EigenDA

The most notable feature of EigenDA's ecosystem partners is that most RaaS (Rollup as a Service) projects such as AltLayer, Caldera, Conduit, and Gelato have chosen it. This indicates that projects outsourcing Rollup operations may deliberately opt for DA with low data submission costs and no need to independently run light clients, as they have largely abandoned decentralization.

In addition, high-performance chains such as Fluent, SOON, and MegaETH are also worth paying attention to. These chains require a volume of data submitted in real-time that far exceeds other chains, and they pursue extreme performance efficiency, so it is logical to choose EigenDA, which currently has the best throughput. According to data from L2 BEAT, Mantle and Celo, which have the highest TVL among Validium/Optimium, are also using EigenDA, and these two chains alone account for about 40% of the total TVL in this category (approximately $3.06 billion). As potential chains like SOON and MegaETH go live, this proportion may further increase.

Celestia

Eclipse currently accounts for over 90% of Celestia's data usage. This may be due to Eclipse's aim to achieve ultra-high performance through GigaCompute, with its data upload volume far exceeding that of other chains, and on-chain activity was also very active before its TGE.

On the other hand, the Celestia ecosystem has already supported various Rollups. Apart from the general L2 Manta, the rest are almost all dedicated Rollups (or application chains). This seems to relate to the trust assumption of finality mentioned above: because the Rollups within the Celestia ecosystem can overcome their relatively long 10-minute DA finality challenge time through single-slot finality (SSF), they have both decentralization and performance advantages in the application chain ecosystem. This also explains why the Initia ecosystem chooses to use Celestia.

Avail

Avail operates various stacks in addition to DA, including the interoperability stack Nexus and the multi-asset consensus layer Fusion, so it has many partner projects, just regarding DA partners:

• Application Chains: Fuse, Ternoa, Arcana, OpenLayer, Darwinia, Neova, Stackr
• Bitcoin ecosystem: Yala, Zulu, BVM, (Starkware)
• Ethereum L2: Sophon, Lens
• Re-staking: Symbiotic

Similar to Celestia, Avail's main ecological partners are also application chains, rather than high-performance L2. However, its uniqueness lies in attempting to create synergies with projects joining its ecosystem by combining DA with Fusion and Nexus stacks.

• Nexus: Integrates and verifies the state of all chains within the ecosystem through zero-knowledge proofs.
• Fusion: Provides economic security by supporting staking of ETH, BTC, SOL, and all ERC20 tokens.

Avail has quickly occupied the Bitcoin L2 ecosystem by providing multi-asset consensus, including Bitcoin, and the highest security structurally. Recently, it introduced a re-staking framework (Avail DA + Fusion) through a partnership with Symbiotic. This shows that Avail's ultimate direction is distinctly different from other DAs.

Short-term Vision of DA Layer

EigenDA: Pursuing Higher Throughput

EigenLayer completed its slashing mechanism upgrade on April 18 to address long-standing criticisms regarding its lack of economic security. It is expected that many new projects that were previously hesitant to adopt EigenDA due to the lack of a slashing mechanism will begin to integrate.

EigenDA was criticized for delaying the introduction of DAS and penalty mechanisms, and the team has committed to achieving decentralization in the long run. However, the short-term upgrades of the protocol clearly showcase its development direction, including the upcoming Blazar (EigenDA V2) upgrade.

Blazar Upgrade

Public information about the Blazar upgrade is relatively limited, but EigenDA aims to improve latency and throughput through V2, potentially changing the project's underlying infrastructure.

Source: EigenDA Docs

The above image shows the architecture of EigenDA V1 and V2. A new component called "Relay" has been added, specifically designed for storing Blob blocks or for high-speed distribution, significantly improving the data transmission speed and download performance of DA nodes.

In version V1, the Disperser sends both Blob headers and Blob blocks to the DA nodes simultaneously, which leads to excessive network load. V2 separates the transmission of Blob headers and Blob blocks, allowing DA nodes to observe the Blob headers and request data as needed. This architecture improves efficiency and minimizes DDoS risks by reducing the data transmission load.

In addition, by removing batch bridging and internalizing Blob confirmations in the Rollup logic, EigenDA aims to reduce Rollup confirmation delays from several minutes to a few seconds.

Although V2 includes multiple updates, it is clear from the Blazar upgrade that EigenDA's mid-term roadmap focuses on enhancing data transmission speed. Even though it currently offers an astonishing throughput of 15 MB/s, it seems to intend to dominate the market by further improving performance.

Celestia: Towards the Endgame of DA

Source: Celestia Blog

Celestia disclosed its roadmap in the blog update of September 2024, as shown in the above image. Its goals can be summarized as:

• Expand block size to GB level to support all blockchains;
• Optimize light node performance to achieve DA verification on all devices.

The roadmap shows that Celestia is advancing multiple development directions in parallel. These directions are not limited to a specific field, but strive to achieve scalability in various aspects such as throughput, verifiability, and interoperability. This may slow down the completion speed of the roadmap, but it indicates a long-term vision of building a "complete DA" to cover all blockchains.

The project progress sharing of Celestia is relatively transparent, holding a developer conference call (Live dev call) every two weeks and regularly updating the development progress on GitHub. Through this method, we can indirectly confirm Celestia's development roadmap and priorities.

So far, the mainnet has undergone two upgrades, namely Lemongrass and Ginger. The Lemongrass upgrade includes some updates aimed at enhancing the compatibility of the IBC ecosystem, such as cross-chain accounts and packet forwarding modules; while the Ginger upgrade focuses on scalability, reducing block confirmation time to 6 seconds and doubling throughput. The protocol recently completed its third network upgrade "Lotus", but this is an update related to token inflation and staking rewards, rather than a significant technical upgrade.

It is noteworthy that Celestia launched the Mamo-1 testnet on April 14, aiming to significantly improve performance by increasing the block size to 128 MB, which will boost throughput to 21.33 MB/s (over 16 times the current level). In addition, Celestia has hinted through a tweet that a major update will take place on May 16, which may announce the launch of the Mamo-1 mainnet.

Overall, Celestia continues to share its development progress, confirming that it is advancing multidimensional upgrades in parallel. However, with the recent emergence of numerous high-performance L2 solutions, its short-term direction seems to have shifted towards aggressive performance enhancements, as DA throughput is becoming increasingly important.

Avail: Full-stack DA, but scalability first

The above figure illustrates the core concept of Avail: placing a greater emphasis on security compared to other DAs, and aiming to achieve highly compatible interactions within the ecosystem through the DA, Nexus, and Fusion stack.

However, in the short term, in order to ensure competitiveness with other DA layers, Avail also seems to be prioritizing throughput enhancement. Avail released updates related to scalability roadmaps consecutively in March and April this year. The first was the TurboDA protocol disclosed in March, which significantly reduces the final confirmation time of DA to 250 milliseconds. TurboDA is closer to a layered solution rather than a direct upgrade to AvailDA: when data is submitted to TurboDA, it first provides preconfirmation like existing rollups and then completes final confirmation in AvailDA after 2 blocks. Although this approach may not be completely secure, its goal is to provide interoperability speeds similar to Celestia SSF levels for Rollups within the ecosystem. (Note: The technical details of TurboDA have not yet been found.)

The second item is the upgrade of the block size to 10 GB level disclosed in April, aimed at maximizing interoperability between rollups within the ecosystem, and reducing the block time from the current 20 seconds to 600 milliseconds. To achieve this goal, AvailDA proposed the following plan:

• Optimize by shortening the process of generating data and commitments;
• Selectively transfer block data based on Blob header;
• Verify transactions unrelated to DA separately through zero-knowledge proof mechanisms, thereby separating the DA verification process from DA. This is fundamentally similar to the direction suggested by other DAs, and if one wants to significantly increase the block size, this seems to be an inevitable direction.

The measures taken by Avail may give the impression that its development direction has changed, as it is known for prioritizing security and interoperability, yet it has recently been continuously proposing updates related to performance. However, the ultimate goal of the performance upgrades is to enhance interoperability between the Rollups that join the ecosystem, so we can consider that its fundamental direction has not changed.

The Future of the DA Market

The main competitors in the current DA field, EigenDA, Celestia, and Avail, are clearly aiming to expand their market. In the short term, all three are expected to achieve satisfactory levels in performance and security through high throughput based on large blocks and DAS.

At the same time, the DA market is expected to experience rapid expansion. With the emergence of ultra-high-performance L2s such as MegaETH and Eclipse, the amount of data they need to process far exceeds that of existing Rollups. If this data is processed through Ethereum Blobs, the costs would be too high, so they have to use high-throughput DA protocols. Additionally, emerging data demand scenarios (such as 0 G for chain-level AI computing and Bitcoin L2) will also give rise to a new DA market.

However, the current DA ecosystem still needs to overcome the following obstacles to expand the market:

First, some projects are building their own DA layers. A typical example is 0 G, which is constructing and using its own DA layer due to the performance limitations of Celestia and EigenDA as well as the particularities of artificial intelligence computation. In addition, high TVL projects such as Metis and Fraxtal are also developing and using self-researched solutions, namely MEMO and FraxtalDA, respectively. This indicates that self-implemented and controllable DA solutions are more beneficial for the projects themselves in terms of cost and compatibility. On the other hand, most Validium/Optimium currently manage data through off-chain storage based on multi-signatures (DAC), and they have not yet joined the DA ecosystem, which means that existing DA layers lack sufficient interoperability incentives or efficiency to attract these projects.

Secondly, the development of Ethereum DA. Ethereum aims to continuously improve the availability of Blobs to meet network demands and keep it consistent with Ethereum L2. The Pectra upgrade has doubled the number of Blobs, and the upcoming Fusaka upgrade will further increase the number of Blobs.

In the long run, by introducing Danksharding, DAS, reducing finality, and shortening block times, Ethereum will bring itself closer to the performance levels currently supported by the DA protocol. Therefore, from the perspective of the DA protocol, integrating with the existing Ethereum Rollup will become increasingly difficult over time. They will have to face the pressure of maintaining a lead over Ethereum's DA developments. This is also the reason why Celestia and Avail focus on their respective Rollup ecosystems; future DA projects will need not only to provide simple DA throughput and cost-effectiveness but also to possess additional advantages such as strong interoperability.

Conclusion: The DA market is facing the "Battle of Red Cliffs".

Back to the title, the expansion methods of each DA layer resemble the pattern of the Three Kingdoms:

• EigenDA is similar to "Wei State" in that it has overwhelming throughput that far exceeds other DA protocols, and it occupies a dominant position in the performance-centric market due to the security foundation built through re-staking. However, due to the DAC structure and the lack of a penalty mechanism, EigenDA still has security vulnerabilities, which is its biggest challenge in the short term.
• Celestia is similar to "Wu Country" in that it provides fragmented liquidity and interoperability for application chains (or purpose-based Rollups) based on the interoperability and modular structure of Rollups. Currently, it is focusing on compatibility with various computing environment Rollups through the integration of Initia and Eclipse.
• Avail is similar to "Shu Kingdom" in that it has a decentralized level supporting 1000 validators, the highest among DA projects, and adheres to the concept of valuing ecosystem synergies. Its uniqueness lies in its emphasis on building a DA ecosystem based on foundations like Nexus and Fusion, and it is occupying markets that other DAs have yet to explore, such as Bitcoin L2.

The three DA layers have distinct characteristics, but recent upgrades suggest that they may soon face significant conflicts. This is because EigenDA, Celestia, and Avail are all working to improve throughput, especially aiming for substantial increases based on 10GB block size levels. Just as the Battle of Red Cliffs largely determined the fate of the Three Kingdoms, which project can maintain a long-term presence in the DA market will also depend on the direction of performance competition among DA layers in the short term. During the Three Kingdoms period, Zhuge Liang's strategies greatly changed the outcome of the wars, and in the 'Battle of the Three Kingdoms' of the DA layers, it is worth paying attention to who will play this role and what unique advantages each DA protocol can offer beyond performance.