Glacier Network is introducing a revolutionary product — GlacierDA, the first data availability layer for AI.

Decentralized Artificial Intelligence applications encounter a pressing challenge: ensuring data availability for large amounts of off-chain transactions in the AI ecosystem. With AI advancing rapidly, it deals with specific types of data with high-dimensional structure and matrix computation, requiring a data availability layer tailored for the AI environment.

GlacierDA provides a programmable, modular and scalable data availability service that integrates with decentralized storage for Rollups and AI which needs heavy and veritable data workload.

Within the dynamic landscape of the Glacier Network ecosystem, three pivotal products drive innovation forward. GlacierDB revolutionizes large-scale Dapps, providing decentralized data management on Arweave, Filecoin and BNB Greenfield; **GlacierAI **introduces a decentralized vector database, facilitating decentralization of AI data. Today marks another significant milestone as Glacier launched the GlacierDA, solving the demand for off-chain verification and computing of AI and DePIN executed states.

With Glacier’s pioneering approach, it became the inaugural data-centric blockchain to amplify the capabilities of AI and DePIN on a scale never seen before.

🧊 What is Data Availability (DA)

Typically, one blockchain can consist of four core-function layers: Execution, Settlement, Consensus, and Data availability. Modular solutions decouple these functions and concentrate on optimizing specific features, which will increase the total throughput and scalability of the whole system.

Leveraging advanced technical solutions such as data availability sampling, the Data Availability layer facilitates dynamic throughput by enabling light nodes to verify data availability efficiently without downloading all data. The innovation of the DA layer opens up new possibilities, ensuring reliable and efficient operations for millions of rollups and applications.

🧊 Problem Statement: Why GlacierDA

The data availability problem is a critical issue in blockchain, centering on the necessity to make all transaction data publicly accessible and verifiable across the network. As we all know, posting L2 transaction data to L1 requires high gas consumption and may cause congestion on L1. This situation becomes even worse as the L2 ecosystem prospers in the GenAI Era.

The promise and challenges of crypto + AI applications — Vitalik Buterin

In Vitalik’s latest article, he discusses great promise in the synergy between AI and Crypto, and highlights one major objection: cryptographic overhead. Today, the most mainstream on-chain AI/ML approaches today are zkML and opML.

zkML(Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning) combines advanced machine learning techniques with cryptographic methods to ensure data privacy and security. opML(Optimistic Machine Learning) is another approach designed to run large machine learning models on chains efficiently. Both zkML and opML require a data availability layer that is efficient, secure, and capable of supporting the specific demands for Generative AI applications.

🧊 The Solution: GlacierDA

Glacier DA is the first data availability layer which modularly integrates different decentralized storage layers and data availability sampling networks, offering exceptional scalability and robust decentralization.

Decentralized data storage is an essential part of data availability because it must answer the question of where the data is published. GlacierDA integration with decentralized storages further enables to support a variety of availability data types from diversified scenarios not limited to Layer 2 networks but also inclusion of decentralized AI infrastructures.

• Verifiable Computation: GlacierDA solves the demand for off-chain verification and computing of GenAI and DePIN executed states. It ensures that the network remains secure and decentralized by using a PoS consensus mechanism.

• Cost-Effectiveness: GlacierDA is designed to be cost-effective for handling large datasets and maintaining data integrity. All the data in a block is available for validation utilizing GlacierDA sampling network, providing ultra-low costs for applications.

• Scalability for GenAI: GlacierDA functions as a foundational (base) layer, offering scalable data hosting without transaction execution, specifically for rollups and GenAI which relies on heavy data workloads. It plays a key role in the synergy between AI and Crypto.

• Permanent Storage: Permanent storage ensures that all parties can access the data at any time for verification, auditing, or compliance purposes. Decentralized data storage answers the question of where the data is published, crucial for maintaining trust and transparency.

🧊 How GlacierDA Works

Glacier DA redefines blockchain scalability by combining erasure coding, KZG polynomial commitments, data availability sampling, and decentralized storage to deliver world-class data availability guarantees.

🔹 Glacier DA Consensus Chain

Glacier DA Consensus Chain is a crucial component of the Glacier DA network. It is a Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK and is designed to facilitate the Data Availability (DA) layer of the network.

Glacier DA Consensus Chain is built on top of the Tendermint consensus algorithm which is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm that is widely used in many PoS blockchains. Glacier DA provides the following functions on top of Tendermint:

• Enabling the erasure coding of block data

• Partitioned Merkle Tree (PMT)

The full node in the consensus chain is responsible for providing transactions to facilitate the DA layer. This includes transactions for posting data to the network, as well as transactions for validators to participate in the consensus process. Validators verify the block and its transactions, and if a sufficient number of validators agree on the validity of the block, it is added to the blockchain.

🔹Glacier DA Sampling Network

Glacier DA sampling network is composed of full sampling nodes and light sampling clients. The Data Availability Sampling (DAS) used in the Glacier DA ensures that all the data in a block is available for validation, without requiring every light sampling client node to download the entire block.

🔹Transaction Lifecycle

The lifecycle of a transaction within the Glacier DA network is designed to ensure that block data is accessible, verifiable, and efficiently managed:

1. Transaction Submission

2. Erasure Coding

3. Commitment Creation

4. Block Propagation

5. Light Client Network

6. Proof Verification

7. Permanent Storage

Transaction Submission

The life cycle commences when rollups, as primary users of Glacier DA, submit transactions to the network. Each transaction is assigned a unique ID to identify its origin and purpose within the broader ecosystem.

Erasure Coding

Upon arrival at Glacier DA, transactions undergo erasure coding, a process that injects redundancy to bolster data reliability and integrity. This coding splits blocks into ’n’ original segments, expanding them to ‘2n’ to facilitate reconstruction from any subset of ’n’ out of the ‘2n’ segments. Although Glacier DA includes fraud proof mechanisms, the validator consensus, requiring honesty from over 2/3 of validators, is the cornerstone for ensuring the security of the erasure-coded data. Full nodes have the capability to generate and circulate fraud proofs, which enables light clients to authenticate the validity of block headers.

Commitment Creation

Glacier DA takes the redundant data and applies KZG polynomial commitments to each block. These commitments serve as cryptographic proofs of the data’s integrity, ensuring that what is stored is accurate and tamper-proof. The commitments are used by validators to confirm the data’s integrity before it is attested and transmitted to the sampling network via Glacier DA’s data bridge.

KZG commitments provide three important primitives, for a polynomial p(X)=iciXi:

• commit(p(X)) returns a Commitment which is used to identify the polynomial.

• prove(p(X),indices) returns a Proof which can be used to verify that a set of evaluations lies on the polynomial.

• verify(Commitment,Proof,evals,indices) returns a bool indicating whether the committed polynomial evaluates to evals and the provided indices.

Block Propagation

Validators play a pivotal role in Glacier DA. They receive the commitment-laden blocks, regenerate the commitments to verify their accuracy and reach a consensus on the block, which requires agreement from at least two-thirds (super majority). Validators ensure that only verified and agreed-upon data is propagated through the network. They reach consensus This stage is vital for ensuring that the data, once validated, can be relayed via Glacier DA’s data attestation bridge.

Light Clients: The Guardians of Data Availability Using DAS

Light clients within Glacier DA’s ecosystem use Data Availability Sampling (DAS) to verify block data integrity. They check KZG polynomial openings against the commitments in the block header for each sampled cell, enabling them to independently and instantly verify data availability. This method bypasses the need for reconstructing full KZG commitments or relying on fraud proofs, underpinning Glacier DA’s high security and data integrity standards maintained by decentralized verification. However, for more comprehensive data integrity checks, especially for row integrity within the data matrix, light clients perform KZG reconstruction. This approach is more optimal for verifying the integrity of entire rows than validating individual cells.

Proof Verification: The Checkpoint

The journey culminates with light clients performing proof verification. This process involves generating cell-level proofs from the data matrix, enabling light clients to efficiently and independently verify the state of the blockchain. This decentralized approach to verification underpins the security and integrity of Glacier DA.

The settlement in Glacier DA is primarily about ensuring data availability for rollups. The actual transaction execution and finality occur at the rollup layer, while Glacier DA provides the necessary data infrastructure.

Permanent Storage

Glacier DA decentralized storage layer guarantees that once block data is stored, it remains immutable, retrievable, and intact, safeguarding against loss, corruption, or unauthorized alteration. The permanence of data is essential for various reasons, including the ability to audit and verify past transactions or machine learning computations, which is fundamental for trust and accountability in blockchain systems. Decentralized storage layer ensures data is not only stored permanently but also distributed in a manner that aligns with the principles of decentralization, enhancing data resilience and availability across the network.

🧊 Conclusion

Blockchain technology faces a significant challenge: ensuring data availability for off-chain transactions, particularly in Layer 2 solutions and decentralized Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) applications. This limitation affects both scalability and security within these systems.

GlacierDA offers an innovative solution to this challenge, providing a scalable data availability service that integrates decentralized storage with data availability sampling networks. It is designed to meet the specific needs of blockchain and AI applications, ensuring efficient and reliable data verification and storage.

About Glacier

Glacier is the First Data-centric Blockchain to Supercharge DePIN and GenAI at Scale. Glacier is building a programmable, modular, scalable blockchain for storing, indexing, and querying data from off-chains and on-chains, supercharging AI and DePIN.

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