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 issues in the blockchain industry.
On June 4, Avail concluded a heavily oversubscribed Series A funding round, generating $43 million. This amount adds to the $32 million previously raised in pre-seed and seed rounds. Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, intends to utilize these funds to develop a permissionless unification layer for Web3.
Arjun, who is also a co-founder of Polygon, heads Avail with the aim of tackling three significant challenges in the Web3 ecosystem: blockchain fragmentation, inadequate data availability, and limited scalability.
Arjun explained to Cointelegraph that Avail’s data availability solution resolves data availability issues by moving data off-chain and verifying its accessibility. This is achieved through the use of 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.
Avail intends 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 utilizing a new rollup instead of building a separate layer 1.
Arjun emphasized that the increasing number of layer-1 and layer-2 blockchains can have negative consequences, such as fragmentation and confusion for users. He believes that venture capitalists are drawn to Avail’s vision of unification and the solutions it offers for these problems.
To enhance security, Avail plans to enable the restaking of multiple cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), which will inherit security from Avail’s base layer.
Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, a participating venture capital firm, highlighted the ease of creating new protocols using Avail’s technology stack.
Avail’s future plans include the development of Avail Nexus, a unification layer built on Avail’s data availability solution to enhance cross-rollup operability. Additionally, Fusion Security will be implemented to ensure unified and shared security across the Avail ecosystem.