The Optimism blockchain ecosystem is getting its own ‘alternative data availability’ or ‘alt-DA’ chain, called Redstone – courtesy of development team Lattice.
Redstone currently still functions as a test network and aims to be cost-effective for on-chain games and decentralized applications.
Optimism is an ecosystem of so-called layer 2 chains, designed for cheaper and faster transactions, including the original OP Mainnet, currently the second largest layer 2 network in the world in terms of deposited value. The affiliate networks rely on ‘optimistic rollup’ technology – a reference to how transactions are handled on the main ‘layer-1’ or ‘L1’ Ethereum blockchain. In October 2022, developers at OP Labs, who helped create OP Mainnet, released OP Stack, allowing developers to create their own blockchains.
According to a blog post shared with CoinDesk, Redstone would work “like a traditional optimistic rollup, except instead of posting the input state to L1, we post a hash for data commitments. The input state corresponding to the input obligation is stored off-chain by a data availability provider.”
Redstone is technically considered a “plasma rollup blockchain,” the team said.
“We call it alternative data availability because the transaction data is available off-chain, not on Ethereum. Therefore, to maintain security with this architecture, we have the permissionless on-chain DA challenge so that when the data is unavailable or not “If it doesn’t match the data commitment, one can contest it being excluded,” Justin told Glibert, founder and CEO of Lattice, in an email to CoinDesk.
The Lattice team plans to join the Optimism ecosystem and contribute to the OP Stack as core developers, the press release said.
Data availability has been a major topic of discussion in the Ethereum ecosystem as developers look for ways to store and reach consensus on the availability of blockchain data for transactions – without increasing on-chain congestion.
Other data availability solutions, such as data availability tiers like Celestia and Avail, have been developed to address this challenge. Near Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the Near blockchain, last week announced the rollout of a new ‘NEAR DA’ where posting data could be 8,000 times cheaper than posting on Ethereum.
Read more: What is Ethereum’s ‘data availability’ problem and why does it matter?