CURTAIN-RAISE ON DATA AVAILABILITY

There is a great deal of focus at the moment on data availability in the blockchain space, and with Web3 adoption increasing and the astonishing number of new use cases becoming more prevalent, the urgency to address the issue of data availability is at an all-time high. Currently, a lot of focus is being put on how we will scale quickly and most importantly how we will scale securely. This implies that there is a need to develop smart approaches in order to deal with the dilemma of data availability.

The term "data availability" is frequently used in the blockchain industry. But why is it even necessary? What is the benefit of it in the first place? On the blockchain, when a new block is generated, it is essential that we make sure that the data within it is complete, available, correct, and easy to download. Apart from this, it must also be able to be verified and used for subsequent verifications. This problem can also be defined differently in different contexts when it comes to L1 and L2. If in L1, the data is not complete, then the other nodes will not be able to find out what is the correct data, and based on that, a lot of operations will be stopped and the blockchain itself will stall directness. Therefore, if the data in some of the blocks is incorrect or if invalid data got inserted into some of the blocks, then we want to find out about it and ensure that it doesn't contribute to any form of stealing funds or any other kind of inconsistency. In the case of L2s, since they are there in order to scale, we want to ensure that, as we achieve scale, we are not doing it at the expense of security, because we want the scale data to still be correct even when we are achieving scale, and therefore most L2s are still reliant on L1s for data availability.

From my knowledge, there are currently only 2 blockchains that have proposed solutions to the challenge of Data Availability, Ethereum and Syscoin. *Danksharding, a solution based on L2 that Ethereum should launch in 2024, is Ethereum's solution for data availability. A similar solution to the difficult challenge of Data Availability has been proposed by Syscoin. *Their solution is called Proof of Data Availability (PoDA) which is based on its internal L1 and is therefore secured by Bitcoin's PoW, and they introduced it on Syscoin Core version 4.4 (yesterday). Was reading it yesterday and seems like it has couple of well-known qualities that make it an excellent alternative to Ethereum's work-in-progress, Proto-Danksharding.

As we wait for for Ethereum's solution, which might turn out to be an upgrade over Syscoin's PoDA, it is important to emphasize that data availability solutions on blockchains are important if we want to improve blockchain scalability overall.

What are your thoughts on their solutions? Can Ethereum's danksharding be an upgrade over Syscoin's PoDA? ** **Do you know any other data availability solutions out there?

LET'S DISCUSS!