Navigating the next wave of Web3 with Anurag Arjun

In this episode, Hashing It Out dives into the evolving landscape of Web3 and blockchain technology with Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail. The discussion covers the unification of the Web3 ecosystem, the rise of rollups, the challenges of fragmentation, and the innovations paving the way for mass adoption. Listen to the full episode to explore cutting-edge advancements in decentralized technology and how they can revolutionize the future.

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Transcript

Anurag Arjun: But of course, you know, like, analogies are not perfect. It increases the possibility of raising undue expectations from the user base. A lot of unfair expectations and also over-expectation, which can be a problem. Blockchains essentially add these minimized systems to the technology landscape. There is just too much great technology that is being built, but most people outside of the crypto bubble don't really know about this.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: What’s up, crypto fam? Welcome to Cointelegraph’s Hashing It Out. I'm your host, Elisha, and you can find me on Twitter at @GhCryptoGuy. On this show, we will talk about crypto and everything on Web3 with upcoming talent and leaders in the space. We will be taking you on a ride around the crypto block, answering questions and highlighting the next big innovations in this space. Before we dive in, remember to follow us on whatever platform you are tuning in from so you don't miss another episode. And if you want more crypto news as it happens, check out Cointelegraph.com. It's time to hash it out. 

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Hashing It Out. It's been a while. We are back, and we are leaning into a new look and a new design in a couple of days or a couple of months, or should I say a couple of weeks? You're going to see a new look and feel for Hashing It Out soon, if not already. When this podcast comes out, it's going to be the same: amazing conversations, amazing guests, and great insights. Or should I say alpha? Today, we have some alpha. We are talking about the unification of the Web3 ecosystem, or should I say the unification layer of the Web3 ecosystem. I'm joined today by Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, and he will be talking to me about what Avail is working on, and we are going to be discussing fragmentation in the Web3 space. Hello Anurag, and welcome.

Anurag Arjun: Hey Elisha. Nice to meet you, and nice to be here on the podcast.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Amazing. So, let's start with the boring question, which is how did you get into Web3 and how did you end up at Avail?

Anurag Arjun: Yeah. So, I actually started in crypto in 2017. Before that I spent about 11 years in fintech and regulatory technology, mostly in product and engineering roles. 2017 was the time when I co-founded Polygon, and we were actually looking at solutions for scaling Ethereum, and Plasma had come out in 2017. There was this scaling solution framework called Plasma. And so actually, I came into this space while, you know, like Ethereum was going through its first scaling throes, like CryptoKitties was blowing up. There was conditional Ethereum, and so on. And so that was a time when I came into the space and started Polygon. It was known as Matic Network back then but essentially started off as a small team and has grown tremendously over the years. So, personal history, I've been, you know, kind of building a lot of stuff at Polygon, including Polygon PoS, the Plasma solution bridging solution, crafted a lot of the Zcash strategy that required teams like Hermes, Zero, Miden, for example, and so on. And then, actually, Avail started, Avail, within Polygon back in 2020. So, just spun out Avail last year only from Polygon. And, you know, Avail is now a separate entity. So, that's roughly the history of, you know, like what I did before crypto. And yeah, I have spent now almost seven years in the space.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Sounds interesting. That's a long time. People crack jokes that one year in crypto is like ten years in real life. Let's talk about Avail and what you're building. So, what is Avail, and what are you building?

Anurag Arjun: Yeah. Sounds good. So, essentially, what Avail is, you know, like we’re going to go back into the time when we started Avail. This is back in 2020. And at that time, Ethereum was just starting, like they had just published the rollup-centric roadmap for Ethereum in the sense that initially, Ethereum began life as this one single blockchain, and they had plans to move to an execution-sharding roadmap where there would be multiple execution shards and such. But that was actually chucked out and replaced with the rollup-centric roadmap. And so it became increasingly clear that you would, blockchains, as in general, would move from like this monolithic blockchain constructs to a more rollup-centric or modular architecture, where there would be this one base layer, which would have coordinate cryptographic security and would also handle consensus and ordering, and all of the rest of execution will be on rollups. So, that actually started way back in 2019, 2020. And so at that time, you know, I had already worked on Plasma. Plasma was this off-chain execution, off-chain data solution. So, the insight was that we are, blockchains are changing, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, where some of the earlier designs of blockchain, how blockchains would be created in the sense that when Ethereum came by, that was the first general-purpose blockchain. And then, of course, there were a lot of experiments around faster blocks, bigger blocks and so on. So, that was the conventional way of building a new blockchain. And so your series of experiments after Ethereum which led to things, you know, like Solana, for example, and a bunch of other blockchains, us and others that came.

Anurag Arjun: But, like, in 2020, it dawned on me and my fellow co-founder Prabal that essentially, that was not going to be the way to scale, like it was going to be like a whole bunch of rollups, like tens of thousands of rollups on top of a single secure base layer. And, of course, you know, Ethereum started with that roadmap. But there we could already see, I mean, even at Polygon, we were building rollups, and we could see that there would be these hundreds of rollups that would be coming. And there is this thing called data availability that is relatively less-known part of blockchain literature. And it is fundamentally very important. And that's where we started with, right? Like we said, why can we architect a blockchain that looks at solving this for the rollup-centric roadmap from a very foundational perspective? And so that's why we began with what we call Avail DA, or Avail data availability, which is the first part of our roadmap, which essentially creates this scalable, state-of-the-art reliability layer with data sampling and is actually the only project that implements data sampling with polynomial commitments and validity proofs. Ultimately, Avail is, you know, like infrastructure for rollups. So, we don't have any smart contracts, we don't do any execution. What we enable is hundreds and thousands of rollups on top of Avail. So, that's kind of the rough summary of what we do. But of course, there's a lot of much deeper into what we are building in the first stage and in future phases as well.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: That sounds good. I don't know if a lot of people bring this up, but I know Avail was being built as part of Polygon, correct me if I'm wrong, in the past, and then it's spun off to become its own project. Was there a reason for this transition? And, like, could it have been that Avail would have still been part of Polygon?

Anurag Arjun: So, I mean, if you look at Polygon at the time when we took the decision to spin out, there were probably, like, Polygon had grown pretty big at that point in time. There were like 7 or 8 projects within Polygon. So, if you kind of think of it right, there was Polygon PoS, there was something called Edge, there was something called Supernets, Hermes, Zero, Miden, Polygon ID, Nightfall, and Avail, right? So, there was this. I think we just grew too big, and we just had a lot of products in one company. And like any company in the space, it still has to function as a startup. And so it's very difficult to run probably nine products from within one company. So, I think, of course, that was one of the reasons. Of course, you know, there are other reasons in the sense that the Polygon brand itself is very much associated with rollups or Ethereum L2, for example. And so it's in the business of creating this execution framework where it doesn't build any sort of execution capabilities. On the other hand, it partners with rollups and execution frameworks. And so it was its infrastructure. And so, the branding would not have accommodated both a Polygon and an Avail, for example. And also, the thing is, we want to be credibly neutral infra. We want to support rollups not only from Polygon but also from, let's say, zkSync, StarkWare, Arbitrum, Optimism, Sovereign Labs, Stackr Labs, like any rollup framework that needs this service we want to work with. And so essentially, it was just better to run away as a separate entity with its like own identity. So, that was kind of the thinking behind the spin-out.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: That sounds interesting. So, let's discuss a couple of things in the Web3 space. And it's a question I've had to ask a couple of people who have come on the show because we have a situation where the Web3 space is growing quickly, and one of the biggest trends is the creation of new layer-1 blockchains and new layer-2 blockchains. Do you think that the consistent increase in the number of layer 1s and layer 2s is detrimental to the space? And we could break it down into what that means for liquidity. Does this confuse new users who are coming in? Because now they have to not just make a choice of the token they want to buy, which was already confusing at a point. But now they also have to make a choice of, what blockchain do I want to use? Are we running into a situation where we have too many layer 1s and layer 2s?

Anurag Arjun: Yeah, I mean, actually, that's a good question. I mean, there are a lot of different angles to look at this from, right? So, maybe I'll talk about from our developer angle and from like a chain developer angle and from user angle. So, from a chain developer angle, right? Someone who wants to build a new chain, why do they want to build it? Essentially, it's the majority of rollups, for example, or maybe L1 chains that we used to see before where folks of the EVM. So, someone took the EVM and bigger blocks or faster block times, for example, and so on. Now, if you look at different L1s like, let's say, Solana, for example, or EOS or, you know, like a number of other ones, what they are doing is they are doing broadly two things. They are bringing in new execution environments. So, if you look at Solana VM, it's a new virtual machine. If you look at other blockchains, for example. So, they are experimenting like, let's say, with Move, for example, and various other execution environments. So, there are two things they are doing. So, one is experimentation on or innovation on the execution environment, which is certainly very much needed. Like, I mean, EVM is a pretty good environment, but there should be experimentation with new execution. Now, the second thing that they are doing is basically to support this execution environment.

Anurag Arjun: You also need to kind of create cryptographic security for securing that blockchain from an L1 perspective. And so, there are either various consensus mechanisms used. But also on top of that incentive mechanism used to, you know, like bootstrap this cryptographic security, but also to incentivize the community. And so, generally, that takes place shape in terms of like a proof-of-stake system, probably with a token attached to it. And so if you kind of look at it from that perspective, what the chain developer really wants to do is build a new chain. But they have to do two things. They have to innovate with the execution environment, but they also have to, you know, let's say, bootstrap a validator set. They have to bootstrap the token, for example, and so on. And so that provides a cryptographic security on which the blockchain will run. So, from a chain developer angle, these are some of the things that they have to deal with from an L1 perspective from an L2 perspective, like why are L2 now so popular? And essentially, why are people taking interest? It is because I demarcated the two different things, right? Like one is innovations in execution environment. And the second thing is the bootstrapping of the cryptographic security. So, what the L2 construct is really doing is it is leaving the execution environment innovation, of course, to the chain developer, but it kind of removes or mitigates the need for bootstrapping.

Anurag Arjun: You know, the cryptographic security or recruiting a set of validators, coming up with a new token for cryptographic security and so on. And so, essentially, the L2 construct is that there is this base layer which will have a certain amount of cryptographic security and some other attributes, and you can build out various blockchains on top with different execution environments. So, that is how that is the fundamental difference between the L1 construct and the L2 construct. And so that's why if you see in the rollup world or in the L2 world, you are seeing massive new innovation in terms of new execution environments, new kinds of transaction pricing, new kinds of access mechanisms, authorization mechanisms, and so on. If you look at like, to give a concrete example, right, like if you look at the Base, for example, the Base developers took the OP stack software from Optimism and spun up a new chain. And then they focused on things like the GTM, for example, and the user acquisition, and liquidity, and so on. And so essentially what the L2 approach really provides is this flexibility to kind of build more stuff on top and focus on things like GTM and user acquisition, rather than on bootstrapping a new token, bootstrapping a validator set, and so on, because you have to pay for the cryptographic security.

Anurag Arjun: So that's the angle from the chain developer perspective, right? Just to be very clear, you know, what are the decision-making points that a chain developer goes through now? Like coming back to your original question on, you know, like from a user angle, of course, whether it is multiple ones or multiple L2s, it's essentially the number of chains start going up. And then, people have to take the cognitive effort of figuring out which chain is secure, which chain has the most liquidity, which app. Should I do this transaction, for example, and so on? So, certainly, that is a problem, right? And that’s why we are talking about the fragmentation problem and such for example. But the reality is that like if you take the example of apps on the internet, apps on the internet don’t really live on one big supercomputer, right? Like they live on these different servers. And these servers are scaled independently based on demand. So, you'll have some big apps using a lot of infra. You'll have, you know, like other smaller apps that are just starting out, living on smaller servers, for example, and so on. And I think that the same thing is going to happen to blockchains as well, in the sense that the role of blockchain is kind of like the new server for development, right?

Anurag Arjun: Like, so that again, you know, like, brings us to the question of fragmentation, right? So, in that sense, what I posit is this is, of course, like we are in the middle of this migration of building the core infra and getting it ready for user experience. Because if you look at, again, like the apps on the internet analogy, users in the internet apps don't really care where the app is served from which server it is, whether it is a Google Cloud or AWS or Amazon, like it doesn't really matter to them. What is important to them is the utility of the application, and that's what they really do. But of course, you know, like analogies are not perfect. Like if you kind of, you cannot directly compare internet app infra to blockchain infra because blockchains have the additional attributes that they bring to the table. Is trust minimized access or trustlessness in that sense? And so what I'm trying to posit is that blockchain still needs a little bit more work to get to a shape where you have a lot of chains, but they are abstracted away or strung together by some shared notions of validity. Now, that shared notions of validity used to be different sorts of cryptographic security, you know, coming from different ones. But now, because there is this new modular sort of an architecture, you have this common base layer where there are these hundreds and thousands of rollups on top, which all share the same economic security.

Anurag Arjun: And so we will get to a point where apps user, you will use apps, and they don't really need to care about the chains because these chains will be secured by a common base layer, like Avail, for example. And, you know, they will have shared notions of validity by ZK-proofs, for example, and so on. And so we certainly need, need a little bit more time to get to that. But in the meantime, I agree, right? Like, I mean, there's going to be a lot of change and a lot of user experience problems. But yeah, I mean, the central idea of Avail is, you know, like to solve this problem. Like we built this first foundational DA layer to build out this foundational base layer on which thousands of rollups can work. And then, we build something like Avail Nexus on top, which introduces this shared notion of validity for rollups on top, so that once the build-out for Avail Nexus is complete, Avail DA is going to mainnet. Pretty soon, Avail Nexus will go to mainnet, probably end of this year or next year. And that primarily looks at solving the problems of the fragmentation that we just discussed.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: That sounds interesting, and I look forward to seeing what that would look like. But on the broader scale, or in the broader sense, what do new blockchains, or should I say blockchains, generally, need to do to bring in mass adoption? I think we have had various cycles of mass adoption that have been usually pushed by price action. And then we've also had pockets of innovation that have genuinely brought in multiple people. Even during the bear run, we saw some applications genuinely tickle the curiosity of the masses and bring them in to try out blockchain technology. What is that killer feature or a set of killer features that need to be developed, or even if they currently exist? Are there things that we can do to build on top of that to get more people into the blockchain space?

Anurag Arjun: Yeah, I mean, I think, in general, like, why are we building all this infra in the first place, right? Like, why is this whole industry building so much infrastructure in the first place? Like what are blockchains really useful for? Like so in general, like what I like to believe is that blockchains essentially add this trust minimized systems to the technology landscape. So, essentially, you know, like I like to think of this as more like how trust has evolved over the centuries and how technology has played a role in enabling this trust. So, what do I mean by that? Probably like a few hundred years ago, humans used to live in like small communities. And so the circle of trust was pretty small. People used to interact with people in the community and rarely outside of the community. And. And so, as and when technology began getting better, for example, the size of the communities who coordinate that started growing. And to a point that probably now you feel extremely comfortable. Let's say someone sitting in the U.S. orders can order something from China and then expect that a transaction will go through, the goods will come through, and so on. So, I mean, just like you can visualize, what is the difference between what was there probably a few hundred years ago and how trust was mediated and now how trust is being mediated, right? Like, I mean, how trust works in society is a pretty fascinating view of, you know, like how blockchains really come into the picture.

Anurag Arjun: So initially, of course, there was this circle of trust that was pretty small. Now, trust is essentially mediated by intermediaries. So, you'll have all sorts of institutions or social groups coordinating trust. So, you'll have, let's say, financial intermediaries like banks, like other financial institutions, which will run some sort of ledger. These could be payment ledgers. This could be, you know, like financial derivatives, supply chain systems, for example. But it can also be, you know, like things like social intermediaries, like, let's say, Facebook, WhatsApp, for example, which kind of do the task of mediating communication. So, there's various of kind of looking at how trust has evolved over the centuries and why I take trust as an example is like if you look at these, how humans have evolved over the centuries and, you know, like how trust has evolved, there is this concept of high trust societies and low trust societies. Historically, societies that have been able to instill high trust have been very successful. Whenever there is low trust in society, it is much more friction for people to progress, to economically move ahead, for example, and so on. And so you will see different countries with very high trust but countries with very low trust societies. And there are countries where there will be pockets of high trust with, you know, like generally low trust, for example, and so on.

Anurag Arjun: So it's a useful framework to look at this now, kind of if you kind of look at it from that landscape, even if you look at very simple things like taking the example of a stock exchange, even the most modern stock exchange today, like it's essentially what a stock exchange enables, is literally an exchange of certain assets, like it could be stocks, it could be commodities, it could be anything. And even the most modern stock exchanges have this T+2 angle where, you know, like, stocks are settled two days after the transaction happens. In some cases, it might be maybe a day, for example. But if you look at something like a Uniswap or any sort of AMM or an exchange on the blockchain, like these are noncustodial and atomic in the sense that swap happens instantly. There is no intermediary handling the funds in a traditional stock exchange, for example, or any sort of exchange. There are custodians which you need to rely upon for doing this properly, for example, and so on. And even if you… like, just look at this limited example, something like a Uniswap. Like I know it currently only supports mostly crypto assets, for example, but there is no reason why you cannot have other kinds of assets. You already have something like USDT, USDC. These are already USD equivalents of these real-world assets, for example.

Anurag Arjun: And so what I'm trying to say is that trust is intermediate through ledgers. And these ledgers are right now coordinated by various intermediaries. Like now, I'm not saying all of these intermediaries are bad, right? I mean, it's just the way that the world has progressed or evolved. And so these are, trust is intermediate through a patchwork of ledgers. So, there are hundreds and thousands of ledgers that are there. And then each ledger tries to talk to other ledgers to coordinate anything like, let's say, cross-border transfers or so on and so forth, right? And so if you kind of look at the foundational aspect of blockchains, right, like these are just really global ledgers. And so that's why it's very important. The chain abstraction thing is very important. Or the fragmentation thing is very important because essentially all of these need to have one, some shared notions of validity, after which they can act as, you know, like one single ledger. And so the idea is that even today, something like a Uniswap is far better than the most modern stock exchange because it gives you noncustodial, like it removes custodial risk that the intermediary can run away with the funds. It also removes a risk in the sense that the counterparty will not give you the asset in return for what you have given, for example, and even a simple example like that is tremendously useful. The question is not that blockchains are not useful.

Anurag Arjun: The thing is that any new technology, when it comes, you have to make it easy, make it frictionless for developers, for developers to do a lot of tinkering around and, you know, like basically putting this technology to use in the right places. And so, unfortunately, the blockchain industry has also had a problem because of the financialization of, you know, like things like cryptocurrency tokens, for example, and so on. The mainstream perception is that, you know, like 90% of crypto projects are a scam, for example, and so on. And so that is a very bad rep for the industry in general because if you kind of look at the quality of work that is done in terms of, you know, like new execution environments, zero-knowledge proofs, for example, it is fundamentally state-of-the-art technology. Like what crypto has really done, it has kind of accelerated the development of technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, things like MPC, efficiency, consensus theory, for example, and so on, and actual implementations. And I think it's not like blockchain has no utility, it's just that we need to kind of frame it to application developers in such a way that it is, of course, easy to use, but it also can be used in these variety of use cases. And so there's a lot of education that we need to do outside of the cryptosphere or the bubble that, you know, like a lot of us get into.

Anurag Arjun: I mean, just to finish off that thought, right? Like, I mean, if you kind of look at mobiles, actually, world. You know, if you kind of look at the history, like some of the breakout apps like Uber and Instagram did not come on day one or when the mobile OS came out, right? Like it, there was this sustained phase of experimentation by a lot of mobile app developers. And so there were so many, many experiments that compounded and, you know, led up to a point where someone thought, oh, can I, you know, like this mobile goes with the user everywhere, and it has GPS. Can I take this insight and apply it to the passenger driver tracking problem, matching problem, for example? Or you know, like this camera goes everywhere with the user. Can I put a social element on it, for example, and allow people to post selfies on this network, which they can share with friends? And so what I'm trying to say is that you need to make the technology easy to approach for application developers and, of course, inexpensive. And you need to allow them to have this sustained phase of experimentation, out of which there will be like some sort of new breakout app. Because, see, innovation is always very unpredictable. It doesn't come in the ways that we predict, like no one predicted, like, an Uber when the first mobiles came out, right?

Anurag Arjun: Like it is emergent behavior. You cannot take an attribute of the technology that comes, and then you have this period of experimentation, and then you have this insight or breakout insight that comes sometimes, right? Like so, I mean, I know I kind of took up a lot of screen time with this in the sense, but this is what I think, right? Fundamentally, this technology is actually pretty simple, right? Like it's just the world runs on ledgers, and this is just like a ledger that is not run by an intermediary. And, of course, if you get into the brass tacks, there are differences in implementation and so on. But the world runs on ledgers, it runs on disparate set of ledgers. And blockchains bring a solution to that problem. Now, how do we kind of make these developers and executives who kind of are in the business of making these ledgers use this? And so, as with any other technology, there are these early adopters, you know, like then followers, for example, and then it goes mainstream. So, it's a bit of all of this. And also, you know, like the problem is, of course, the space is so financialized that also creates problems which were not very clear in, you know, like previous technology revolutions, like let's say mobiles or even AI, for example, like AI was ignored for the longest time.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Very thorough answer. I got caught up listening to you explain what could be done talking about adoption and uses. One of the other trends has been airdrops, and we've seen multiple airdrops since the time of Uniswap. Airdrops have taken a different shape over the last couple of months. We've seen lots of users unhappy with various airdrops. I've personally been unhappy myself with some airdrops in the past, and Avail recently had an airdrop of its own where it rewarded multiple users across multiple layer 1 and layer 2s. Is it difficult doing an airdrop in 2024 that makes the masses happy?

Anurag Arjun: I mean, I would say certainly I think the point of the main goals for the airdrop were to inform a broad swath of the L2 community, including the users, but also developers. I mean, if you look at the airdrop, we actually did very systematically. We gave a part of the tokens to developers who kind of built a lot of the blockchain infra that, you know, like we are standing on the shoulders of giants. So, we ought to kind of incentivize developers who build this infra. So, I think one part of that went to developers. Big swaths went to users of rollups, specifically on their Ethereum L2s, which is Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, StarkWare and zkSync. This was to kind of inform those communities about Avail so that, you know, like once rollups start launching on Avail, it's good for them to be also start transacting on these rollups as well, for example, depending upon the utility. And then, of course, you know, like we did some to our own community which helped us test the testnet, for example, and the light clients, for example, and so on. We also actually gave, you know, like airdrops to the Protocol Guild from Ethereum, which spearheads the Ethereum core development, for example, and a variety of other governance councils as well. So, what I'm trying to say is that any team has to go through a lot of planning to kind of target segments that are useful for the project today and, you know, like in the coming months and years.

Anurag Arjun: And so, of course, it's pretty hard for the teams to come up with criteria that will satisfy a lot of the people during the time of the early airdrops. Like you mentioned Uniswap, for example. You know, actually, to be very frank, it was a very simpler world in the sense because there were very few projects which did airdrops at the time. So, at the time, it was pretty simple, for example, to be doing these airdrops now that we have had time. There are so many projects doing airdrops, and the number of people who kind of are excited by this. Airdrops are also increased significantly. There's also a lot of, you know, like because blockchains are permissionless, there's a lot of Sybil happening, for example, and so on. So, it's very difficult to coordinate these airdrops. But having said that, we try to do the best that we can under the circumstances. And then I think one point that's a slight problem is this point meta that came over the last one year or so, and I think…

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: I'm really happy we’re getting into points, because that's another frustration that lots of people in the space have. But yeah. Go ahead.

Anurag Arjun: No, I think the problem with the points thing is, you know, like so I will contrast this with other incentive mechanisms like, you know, like not the airdrop, but let's say liquidity mining, for example. In the early days, like let's say Sushi, for example, or, you know, other protocols that away, for example, that had liquidity mining, like, so you had like a certain program for, let's say, bringing in liquidity to the system, and then you would get some sort of rewards. And so, there was like a very quantitative feel to that program. And because users were very clear, knew what they would get for that activity. The point thing is slightly problematic. I mean, see, I am not totally against points. Points can be great, but they have to be used carefully because what you are really doing with points is that in certain projects, what happens is people who are not communicated with or do not get what exactly the points mean. And so what that sets up in the mind is a very inflated expectation of rewards. So, there is no quantitative basis on which the conversion to actual rewards will happen, for example. And so the problem with the points or the danger of doing points without any major communication or clear communication is that it increases the possibility of raising undue expectations from the user base, which can be a problem. I mean, points are useful, but you have to be a little bit clear. Otherwise, it leads to a lot of unfair expectations. And also over-expectations are what I feel.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Yeah, I think points are really difficult to dissect and decipher, even for us users. And I just sometimes think like some projects may launch point programs without the end in sight. So, you have like lots of points being distributed through multiple ways. Then they get to the airdrop, and they are unsure where they should be: a tiered system or a linear system. And then it creates a lot of confusion in their community. But I think it's a broader conversation that I probably should do a podcast on in the future. So, my last question to you is, in the next six months, what are the biggest advancements you see coming to the Web3 space and Avail as a project?

Anurag Arjun: I think like rollups. We are certainly going to become very big. And these and the rollups, I think most people, or the model for most people when they hear rollups is EVM rollups. But actually, that's not true. Like rollups can be any sort of execution environment. Like you can even write rollups today in custom rollups and, you know, like JavaScript, TypeScript, for example, in Rust, for example, there are other execution environments that are coming in. So, I think basically, I mean, it's not an exact analogy, but similar to how apps on the internet are written in various languages and run in various sort of… I think the future of blockchains really lies in rollups because they kind of mitigate the problem of validator set bootstrapping and cryptographic security bootstrapping in general. And so I think rollups will become pretty huge now once. So, we are anticipating like hundreds and thousands of rollups, even more. And so, that will continue to rise because the cost of running a rollup now or creating a new chain now is becoming lower and lower by the day. So, that certainly is going to increase. And so, of course, user experience fragmentation is also going to increase. And so, but you know, like zero-knowledge-proof technology has also matured significantly in the last three years. And I think basically, and what we are also kind of doing is like today, we are close to launching the Avail DA mainnet, data availability mainnet, which is useful for scaling rollups, blockchains. But we also have been working over the last year on something called Avail Nexus, which we will release toward the end of this year or early next year.

Anurag Arjun: And this basically uses zero-knowledge proof, or ZK-proofs, to kind of solve the issue of chain fragmentation. And so that's what we call the unification thesis. So, that's what something I'm pretty excited about. Also because rollups will become increasingly easy to deploy and to program, right? Like I mentioned that, from a developer perspective, there are rollup stacks being developed that you can develop in TypeScript or JavaScript, for example, in Rust, for example, and so on. And so, this reduces the friction for the developer to build these rollups. So, we will see like an influx of more Web2 style developers to the space who can program in their languages and, you know, like build up these apps pretty fast, which are not necessarily constrained by being sharing their execution with multiple other apps. And, you know, like getting locked out by high fees if, you know, some app becomes very popular and so on. So, those are the kinds of developments that I'm really looking forward to. And, of course, on the more softer side, there is just too much of great technology that is being built. But most people outside of the crypto bubble don't really know about this. And so I think awareness of things like zero-knowledge-proof technology, validity proofs and so on, I think this is going to increase. And zero-knowledge proofs are not only useful from a blockchain perspective, they’re useful in a variety of other perspectives, as well. And so I will see all of this being, you know, used in more and more user-facing environments pretty soon.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: Awesome. Thanks very much for joining me on this episode of Hashing It Out. I look forward to interviewing you in the future, and let's see what happens with Avail in the next couple of months.

Anurag Arjun: Thanks, Elisha.

Elisha Owusu Akyaw: All good things must come to an end. And so does our show. You've been listening to Hashing It Out by Cointelegraph, where we talk about crypto and everything Web3. I'm your host, Elisha, @GhCryptoGuy on Twitter, and if you liked this episode, please make sure to subscribe and leave a review. Please do this. It will really help us out. I need to get out of my mom's basement. Don't get me fired. Subscribe wherever you're listening to us. Leave a review, and have a great day. Thank you.

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