Who will build the infrastructure to unify the Ethereum package?

Ethereum has made meaningful strides in supporting layer-2 bundle scaling, but the ecosystem needs integrated infrastructure from independent third-party players to streamline the user experience.

That's the opinion of Avail co-founder Anurag Arjun, who delves into the current state of the blockchain ecosystem in an interview with Cointelegraph at the EtheGlobal conference in London.

Arjun, who co-founded Ethereum Layer-2 Polygon with Sandeep Nilwal, Janti Kanini and Mihailo Bjelic, has focused on building an agnostic package infrastructure to unify the Ethereum Layer-2 ecosystem.

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During his time at Polygon, the team pivoted to build technology aligned with Ethereum's package-centric roadmap after the release of Polygon's proof-of-stake chain. This change requires new infrastructure. Arjun explains:

“In a global world, we know you need scalable data availability, too. That's why we launched Avail in 2020 at Polygon.”

In the year In March 2023, Arjun acquired the intellectual property rights from Polygon to continue building Avail, allowing him to launch an independent company with Prabal Banerjee.

Arjun told Cointelegraph that they intend to be a package agnostic platform that supports major packaging protocols such as StarkWare, zkSync, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

“The technology we have implemented is called data sampling. It's very similar to what Ethereum wants to do on its sharding roadmap,” explains Arjun.

The roadmap is a long one with a full-fledged Dankeysharding functionality expected to materialize in the next few years. According to Arjun, packages can't wait long for data sampling capabilities that enable efficient validation of packages.

“We realized along the way that we could solve the proliferation of bundles with expanded data availability. That would end up enabling a world with tens or thousands of bundles, but a very bad user experience,” Arjun said.

It is not an accurate reflection of the current Ethereum user experience where one may switch to link funds between different packages or perform transfers or exchanges. This fragmented experience for users and the fragmented nature of packages is what Arjun wants to address:

“In theory, we're going to take the evidence created by independent services and bring them together to allow users across the board to talk to each other.”

The envisioned end result is an “integrated package ecosystem.” Achieving this goal requires a trusted, independent third party to coordinate this process across multiple roles.

Arjun compares Solana's blockchain, which he describes as a “big chain with many applications,” but users only have to contend with one chain. Meanwhile, Ethereum's batch-averaged roadmap has resulted in an ecosystem with many different L2 chains.

“If you look at applications on the Internet, they're not on a giant supercomputer. They are on different cloud services and talk to each other when necessary. We expect the same to happen with packages in general and we want to enable that connectivity,” added Arjun.

AvailNexus is similar to Polygon's recently launched integration layer that collects credentials created by coils built on the L2 chain development kit to facilitate this unique integration requirement between coils.

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Avail's technology can take bundled assertions from Polygon's AggLayer, Starknet, Optimism, Arbitrum or Scroll and create a “composite bundle.” Arjun describes the technology as an ecosystem-wide effort rather than one ecosystem.

It's a future problem that the ecosystem is already thinking about. In a recent presentation by Arjun from Ethereum, co-founder Vitalik Buterin posed the following question: Who builds the infrastructure to unify bundles?

“Either the Ethereum Foundation or some third party that is not in the bundle business,” Arjun concludes.

Buterin attended ETHGlobal in London and focused on the need for a mindset shift to build L2 decentralized applications and solutions with Ethereum's blockchain-enabled functionality.

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