Volition enhanced validium

Who this is for: developers and issuers comparing DA models, including why Lumia's current model differs from this one. You should already know: Validium.

Definition

Volition (sometimes called enhanced validium) is a data-availability model that lets a transaction choose, individually, whether its data is published on the base chain (rollup-style) or kept off-chain with a separate availability guarantee (validium-style). Instead of a chain committing entirely to one model, each transaction (or each application on the chain) picks the trade-off that fits it: an application handling high value per transaction might choose the stronger, costlier rollup guarantee, while a high-throughput, lower-value application chooses the cheaper validium path.

Per-transaction choice model and trade-offs

The mechanism is the same underlying validity proof either way: what changes is only where the data supporting a given transaction is published. This gives an application-level lever that a pure rollup or pure validium doesn't offer: cost and trust assumptions become a per-transaction decision instead of a chain-wide one. The cost is added complexity: a chain (and the tooling around it) has to support and clearly signal both data paths, and a developer has to actually understand which mode a given transaction is using to reason correctly about its guarantees.