Last year, Avail, a modular blockchain project spun off from Polygon, raised $27 million in a seed funding round co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Dragonfly.
Other investors in the round include SevenX Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital and several unidentified angel investors, Avail said Monday.
Avail co-founder Anurag Arjun declined to comment on the round structure and valuation, but sources with knowledge of the matter said the round consisted of a simple agreement on future tokens, giving Avail a fully diluted valuation for multiple tokens. He said he had provided an evaluation. billion dollars.
Arjun said that because Avail is currently in the process of raising another round of financing, he “cannot disclose the valuation until it is complete” and could not comment on the “structure and FDV at this point.”
Avail began operating within Polygon in late 2020 and was funded by Polygon’s treasury until March 2023, after which it became an independent entity from Polygon. As mainnet launch approaches, Avail has raised external funding.
What is Avail?
Avail is a modular blockchain project that aims to simplify the rollup experience because we believe that numerous rollups, including app-specific rollups, will enhance blockchain scalability.
“Rollups scale execution through off-chain computing, but the increase in rollups places significant demands on data availability on Ethereum,” Arjun told The Block. “It will take several years for Danksharding to be fully implemented, which means we need to scale the Ethereum blobspace with a proven, responsive, and scalable data availability layer. This is what Avail DA solves. “He said.
DA is the first of Avail’s “Trinity” products. The other two are Nexus and Fusion Security. Nexus supports permissionless verification hubs that leverage Avail DA as the root of trust to integrate rollups, Arjun said. On the other hand, Fusion Security can bring native assets from the most mature ecosystems, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, to provide additional security to the Avail ecosystem, Arjun added.
Fusion Security sounds similar to a reshoot. Arjun said he was actually inspired by EigenLayer, Babylon, and Osmosis. But Avail Fusion Security “differs from those projects in that it borrows economic security from other assets but penalizes both safety and active failures in the Avail consensus,” he said.
Modular projects are gaining popularity
Modular blockchain projects have been growing in popularity, especially since the launch of Celestia late last year. Earlier this month, modular projects Lava and Inco also raised funding.
When asked how Avail differs from other modular projects, Arjun said that aside from the technical differences, other projects focus on only one component of modularity, such as data availability or data access. “Avail’s product has a much broader focus and exists to mitigate the user experience fragmentation that comes with rollup proliferation,” he said.
Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, said in a statement that Avail’s technology stack provides a “more modular design space” for projects to build on top of the infrastructure. “Avail significantly improves scalability by decoupling the various layers of the blockchain and helps address the current fragmentation issues in the space,” Krug added.
Avail DA is currently in the testnet phase, with mainnet expected to launch around April, Arjun said. Meanwhile, the first version of Nexus is expected to be released later this year, and Fusion Security is expected to be released next year, he added.
Avail currently employs 43 people, including a core team based in Dubai, and Arjun plans to hire more across a range of functions, including engineering and business development.
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