Key Takeaways
Four DA leaders—EigenDA, Celestia, Avail, NearDA—compete to secure rollup data, shaping scalability, security, and Web3’s future.
As the dream of scaling blockchains slams into the reality of data bloat, a new market for modular data availability (DA) has exploded.
The old monolithic chains are struggling, forcing a new generation of rollups to find a home for their transaction data.
Four major projects—EigenDA, Celestia, Avail, and NearDA—are now in a dead heat to become that foundational layer.
They’re not just offering a service; they’re selling competing visions for how to build a decentralized internet, and the outcome will define the rollup economy for years to come.
With Ethereum’s [ETH] own EIP-4844 update creating a new price floor for data, these external solutions can’t just be cheaper; they have to be better, faster, or offer something fundamentally different.
Four projects, four bets
While they all promise to store data securely and make it verifiable, their blueprints look wildly different. Each makes a unique bet on how to best balance security, speed, and decentralization.
EigenDA: Borrowing Ethereum’s muscle
EigenDA’s trick is to not build a new network from scratch. Instead, it taps into Ethereum’s immense economic security through a process called restaking.
Ethereum stakers can opt in to secure EigenDA with their staked ETH, letting rollups “rent” the trust of Ethereum’s validator set.
Architecturally, it uses a central disperser to blast out erasure-coded data to operators, with KZG commitments acting as a cryptographic receipt.
A clever “dual quorum” feature even lets rollups customize their security by requiring two distinct sets of stakers to sign off on data. The system’s full penalty-and-slashing model, however, is still a work in progress.
Celestia: The OG modular chain
Celestia [TIA] was built from the ground up for one job: being a plug-and-play consensus and data layer.
Its secret sauce is Data Availability Sampling (DAS), which lets even lightweight nodes confirm data is available by grabbing tiny, random pieces of it.
This design should theoretically get more secure as more nodes join the network.
It’s built on Tendermint for quick finality and leans on fraud proofs, trusting that if someone posts bad data, at least one honest user will spot it and raise the alarm.
Avail: Built for a world beyond Ethereum
Spun out of Polygon [POL], Avail shares Celestia’s sovereign approach but is laser-focused on servicing many ecosystems, not just Ethereum. It uses DAS, but pairs it with KZG commitments to generate validity proofs.
Think of it as getting an instant, final receipt that the data is good once a block is produced (in about 40 seconds), removing the need for a fraud-proof challenge window.
Its consensus engine is borrowed from the Polkadot [DOT] SDK, blending BABE for block creation with GRANDPA for finalization.
NearDA: Piggybacking on a speedy L1
NearDA isn’t a new chain at all; it’s built on top of the existing NEAR Protocol’s [NEAR] sharded design, Nightshade.
This architecture already splits up the work of processing transactions across many parallel chains, or “shards,” which gives it a huge capacity for data.
When a rollup posts data to NearDA, it’s handled just like any other transaction on the NEAR network, inheriting its security and liveness.
The core bet here is simply on the continued strength of the NEAR protocol and its validators.
| Feature | EigenDA | Celestia | Avail | NearDA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Security Model | Shared (Restaked ETH) | Sovereign (Native Token) | Sovereign (Native Token) | Inherited (NEAR Protocol) |
| Consensus | Inherited from Ethereum | Tendermint PoS | NPoS (BABE + GRANDPA) | Nightshade (Sharded PoS) |
| Validation | KZG Commitments | DAS with Fraud Proofs | DAS with KZG Commitments | Sharded Consensus |
| Trust Assumption | Economic rationality of restakers | Honest minority of full nodes | Honest majority of validators | Security of NEAR Protocol |
Speed vs. spend: The numbers game
For any rollup, the choice of a DA layer boils down to two things: how much data it can handle and how much it costs.
Throughput
On paper, EigenDA is the speed demon. Its mainnet claims a massive 100 MB/s, achieved by separating the act of data dispersal from the slower work of network consensus.
Celestia’s mainnet runs more modestly at 8 MB blocks, which works out to about 1.33 MB/s, though its testnets have shown it can handle much more.
Avail’s mainnet is currently configured for 4 MB per 20-second block (0.2 MB/s), but it has also proven its ability to process far larger 128 MB blocks in tests.
How much to post?
Comparing costs directly is tricky since token prices and network traffic are always changing. But their business models are distinct.
- Celestia has a simple pay-as-you-go “PayForBlob” fee market. For some early projects, this has slashed DA costs by 99% compared to the old way of doing things on Ethereum.
- EigenDA offers more predictable pricing with a tiered system, including fixed annual costs for projects that need guaranteed throughput.
- Avail uses a more complex formula that accounts for both data size and the computation needed, trying to price resource use more precisely.
- NearDA simply uses its efficient base layer to offer what it hopes is one of the most consistently cheap options on the market.
Early analysis for a simple task—posting 100 KB of data every minute—suggests EigenDA’s flexible pricing might give it an edge for annual costs, but the real-world numbers will depend entirely on market conditions.
The real fight: Winning over developers
Cool tech doesn’t win on its own. The only thing that matters is getting projects to actually build on your platform.
Celestia got here first, and it shows. It boasts the largest ecosystem with over 50 rollups, thanks to deep integrations with all the major rollup frameworks like the OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, and Polygon’s CDK.
Big names like Manta Pacific and Plume Network have already signed on.
EigenDA is catching up fast by plugging directly into Ethereum’s gravity well.
By integrating with the same major frameworks, it has attracted heavyweights like Celo and Mantle, who are looking to leverage restaking to cut fees and boost performance.
Avail is playing the unification game, pitching itself as the neutral ground for a multi-chain world.
It supports all the popular frameworks and is attracting projects like Lumia and the AI-focused Heurist Chain that value this cross-ecosystem approach.
NEAR DA has found its niche with projects that need cheap data above all else.
Its low costs have made it a go-to for gaming applications like Web3 games and infrastructure like StarkNet’s Madara sequencer, and it has also secured integrations across the major rollup toolkits.
No single winner, just different tools
Anyone expecting one DA layer to rule them all is going to be disappointed. What’s taking shape is a specialized market where rollups pick their foundation based on their specific needs.
- For Maximum Security: DeFi protocols handling billions of dollars will likely stick with Ethereum’s native DA (EIP-4844). The security is unmatched, and they’ll pay the premium for it.
- For the Mainstream: The big, general-purpose rollups will probably gravitate toward the market leaders with the strongest network effects, making Celestia and EigenDA the main event.
- For Niche Applications: Projects that are extremely cost-sensitive (like gaming) or are built to serve multiple chains will find a compelling pitch in what NearDA and Avail are offering.
This rivalry isn’t just noise; it’s the competitive pressure that’s driving data costs toward zero. It’s forcing innovation and giving builders a diverse set of tools to finally build a scalable Web3.