Internet Computer as a Data Availability Layer

Layer-2 networks are widely used to optimize throughput, latency, and costs by aggregating transactions and posting them, batched, to more established blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Further reduction in blockspace usage is achievable by off-loading the actual transaction data to an external storage medium, while posting only a reference to the chain. Ensuring that off-loaded data is available is not a trivial task and it is referred to as the Data Availability (DA) problem. Currently, Arbitrum Nitro supports the off-chain storage through a set of trusted nodes called Data Availability Committee. In this work, we leverage smart contracts on the Internet Computer network as a storage layer for transaction batches produced by Arbitrum Nitro. Our implementation introduces minimal modifications to Arbitrum Nitro and is realized as a native extension. For the first time, we demonstrate the feasibility of using the Internet Computer as a DA layer, enhancing the usability, latency, and cost efficiency of provisioning and maintaining a decentralized storage network. Consequently, the Internet Computer (IC) can position itself as a canonical solution to the DA problem.