Starkware Plans to Open Source Key Tech Linked to Starknet Prover

February 6, 2023 Bitcoin.com

Starkware commits to open source its ‘magic wand’ Starknet Prover

February 5, 2023 Coin Telegraph

The prover is the crucial engine Starkware uses to roll up hundreds of thousands of transactions and compress them into a tiny cryptographic proof written on the Ethereum blockchain.

Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution StarkWare announced plans to open source its proprietary Starknet Prover under the Apache 2.0 license, which has processed 327 million transactions and minted 95 million nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to date.

The prover is the crucial engine Starkware uses to roll up hundreds of thousands of transactions and compress them into a tiny cryptographic proof written on the Ethereum blockchain.

“We think of the Prover as the magic wand of Stark technology. It wondrously generates the proofs that allow unimaginable scaling,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of Starkware.

*Eli Ben-Sasson presenting at the Starkware sessions 2023. Source: Cointelegraph*

Starkware has faced criticism from the crypto community and competing solutions such as ZK Sync and Polygon for holding onto the IP behind its tech, which contradicts blockchain’s open source and interoperable ethics.

Making the prover open source under the Apache 2.0 license will enable any other project or network — or even games or database developers — to make use of the technology, edit the code and customize it. The tech was released in 2020 and is already being used by ImmutableX, Sorare and dYdX.

*A sneak peek of the Starkware sessions 2023. Source: Cointelegraph*

Avihu Levy, Starkware’s head of product, was reluctant to commit to a time frame for open-sourcing the prover but said it would occur after the token launch and decentralization of Starknet itself. He agreed, however, that it would be possible this year.

“We want to move forward with a decentralized, permissionless network and that means that you need to have this critical component out there,” he revealed speaking to Cointelegraph.

Levy said the decision to open source the prover showed Starkware was increasingly confident about its technology and said it would also enable projects to be more confident about using it as a crucial part of their protocols.

“In StarkEx, it’s sometimes considered vendor lock-up or lock-in. So the commitment wasn’t just a business commitment it was a technology commitment to StarkEx,” he explained.

“This is a strong signal that you will have everything you need to run it yourself independent of Starkware.”

Starkware has already open-sourced its programming language and EVM competitor Cairo 1.0, Papyrus Full node and is in the process of open-sourcing its new sequencer.

Ben-Sasson launched the Starkware Sessions conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday, which organizers said was the largest layer 2 conference held so far.

“This is a landmark moment for scaling Ethereum,” he told about 500 developers and guests. “It will put Stark technology in its rightful place, as a public good which will be used to benefit everyone."

60 Organizations Launch Campaign Urging US Congress to Protect Privacy

February 1, 2023 Bitcoin.com

Decentralized Twitter alternative goes live on Apple’s App Store

February 1, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Apple App Store

The Damus app is powered by Nostr which uses decentralized relays to distribute end-to-end encrypted messages.

Damus, a so-called “Twitter killer” built on a decentralized network has been approved on the Apple App Store.

The Damus team confirmed the approval to its 11,500 Twitter followers on Jan. 31, following what it claims was at least three rejections from the Big Tech player.

Shortly after, Twitter co-founder and Nostr contributor Jack Dorsey shared the news with his 6.5 million followers, with the entrepreneur labeling it as a “milestone” moment for open source protocols:

a milestone for open protocols...#nostr is now officially on the Apple App Store with @damusapp:https://t.co/GQmvPE5nfX
— jack (@jack) January 31, 2023

The app dubs itself the “social network you control” and is a messaging service built on Nostr — a decentralized network enabling encrypted, end-to-end private messaging, among other things.

It plans to become a social media platform with uncensored content. It also has built-in payments through the Bitcoin (BTC) layer-2 Lightning network according to a Jan. 27 post from Protos.

No servers run the network. Instead, Nostr utilizes decentralized relays to distribute messages.

Nostr developers are also focused on using Bitcoin and the Lightning Network to prevent Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) spam attacks on the Damus app.

*The User Interface of Damus displayed on an iPhone. Source:* *Github*

There have been 44 different software developers who have contributed to the code for the Damus web app, according to the team’s GitHub page.

Neat way to fetch bitcoin addresses: #nostr encrypted dms. pic.twitter.com/lMlnIhf3fg
— William Casarin ⚡️ (@jb55) January 29, 2023

Getting Damus on the Apple App Store didn’t come without issues though.

The Damus Twitter page posted that it had failed in at least three attempts before finally being approved:

We replied again clarifying where and how all these features are implemented. That's all we can do at this time....
— Damus⚡️ (@damusapp) January 31, 2023

One of Nostr’s core developers, William Casarin also shared some frustration on his personal Twitter account, stating that it would be a “shame” if Apple users couldn’t use Nostr natively.

While the exact partnership between Dorsey and Nostr isn’t known, the billionaire entrepreneur sent over 14 BTC — worth about $250,000 at the time — in mid-December to help the Nostr developer team.

While the news appeared to have increased awareness of the application amongst the Bitcoin community, other high-profile figures have tested out the Damus app too.

Amongst those include Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden and pro-crypto U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis.

One of the cool things about Nostr ("Notes and other stuff transmitted by relays", a new decentralized protocol that replaces things like Twitter and Instagram)—beyond censorship resistance—is that you aren't limited to 280 characters.

Find me there. pic.twitter.com/B7JUHeeSdP
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) January 23, 2023

At the time of writing, the Damus web app has run into problems. A warning message on the site homepage reads:

“Damus Web is down because there is someone trying to exploit browser loopholes to steal private keys. I would not recommend using a web client at this time. Damus iOS is not affected.”

1inch Network Launches Hardware Wallet for Storing Users’ Private Keys in a Secure Offline Setting

January 19, 2023 Bitcoin.com

Number of devs increased during crypto winter: Electric Capital report

January 18, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Closed-Source

Ethereum continues to be the dominant blockchain for developer activity, however, a few other chains continued to make ground.

The notion that bear markets are good for builders appears to be true with the total number of monthly active Web3 developers increasing 5.4% to more than 23,300 over the last 12 months despite a near 70% drop in crypto prices.

According to a Jan. 16 report from Electric Capital, “full-time” developers — categorized as those who contribute to 76% of Github commits — also increased 15.2% to over 7000, while “one-time” builders fell 6.2% to over 3,500 during the same time period between December 2021 and December 2022

Despite the crypto market capitalization beginning its long plunge from from its all-time high (ATH) of $2.9 trillion in Nov. 2021, monthly developer activity only began to fall in Jun. 2022 after the metric reached its record high of nearly 26,500.

This fall was partly attributed to the fall in developer activity in the Terra ecosystem following its catastrophic collapse in May. 2022.

*Monthly active developer count over time compared to crypto’s market capitalization. Source:* *Electric Capital.*

The next three months from June to September saw a 26% fall in weekly active Web3 developers.

2022 did however see 61,127 new Web3 developers come into the industry — the most ever recorded and a 25.8% increase from 2021.

In fact, more new Web3 developers deployed their first line of open-source crypto code in the past year (109,723) than between 2014 and 2020 (101,054).

*Monthly active developer count since Bitcoin was launched compared to when Ethereum and its smart contract functionalities were introduced. Source:* *Electric Capital.*

Ethereum continues to dominate developer activity, having increased its full-time developer count by 9% to 1,873 — which is more than the next three highest ecosystems combined — Polkadot (752), Cosmos (511) and Solana (383).

Developer counts on non-Ethereum chains are catching up though. The Cosmos and Solana networks increased 34% and 36% respectively, while Starknet is among one of the mid-sized ecosystems to have made a solid run in 2022 with a 214% increase in developer count.

The report also found that following Terra’s collapse only 28 (9%) of the original Terra developers stuck around for Terra 2.0 while 143 developers (42%) called it quits and migrated to other ecosystems.

Many of the former Terra developers migrated to Cosmos, 42 of 143, the most of any other ecosystem.

*The number of full-time developers from each ecosystem since their launch date. Source:* *Electric Capital.*

Electric Capital explained there are many more Web3 developers than accounted for in the report as some projects are close-sourced.

zkSync developer Matter Labs raises $200M, commits to open-sourcing platform

November 16, 2022 Coin Telegraph

zkSync developer Matter Labs raises 0M, commits to open-sourcing platform

Coin Telegraph

Over 150 projects, including Chainlink, Uniswap and Aave, have signaled their intent to deploy on the layer-2 blockchain.

Matter Labs, the developer behind the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible zkSync, has received major industry backing as it pledges to fully open source its platform — marking the first such initiative for a ZK-rollup technology.

Matter Labs confirmed on Nov. 16 that it had closed a $200 million Series C funding round co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly, with additional participation from LightSpeed Venture Partners, Variant and existing investor Andreessen Horowitz. The company has now raised $458 million in financing across all rounds, including $200 million from BitDAO that’s earmarked for funding ecosystem projects.

Founded in 2018, Matter Labs is working to scale Ethereum through zero-knowledge proofs, a digital authentication process that enables seamless data sharing between two parties. Ethereum has enjoyed widescale acceptance among developers in the blockchain community, but mainstream adoption of its technology has been partially hindered by scalability issues. As a ZK-rollup technology, zkSync provides a layer-2 scalability solution for Ethereum that maintains the network’s security or decentralization features.

Over 150 projects have signaled their intent to launch on zkSync’s mainnet, which was released on Oct. 28 as part of a multi-stage process to bring the protocol into full production. Some of its most notable partners include Chainlink, Uniswap, Aave, Curve, 1inch and SushiSwap.

In addition to the funding announcement, Matter Labs disclosed that its zkSync technology would be released through an MIT Open Source license later this quarter. This gives developers the ability to view, modify and fork the code.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Matter Labs’ chief product officer Steve Newcomb said his firm wanted to “drive consensus in open source,” which is why everything in the mainnet release will be fully open sourced by MIT’s standard. He explained that, by open sourcing the protocol, zkSync could become the layer-2 standard for the industry.

“In crypto, one of the major things we want to stop is centralized censorship. Anything other than full open source is centralized censorship of code,” Newcomb said. “We can’t decide who is right or wrong or good or bad.”

Although venture capital has flowed freely into blockchain projects for the past two years, deteriorating market conditions have caused investors to be much more cautious in recent months. According to Cointelegraph Research, venture funding in the crypto and blockchain industry fell 66% quarter-on-quarter to $4.98 billion. Still, 2022 is shaping to be a record year in terms funding deals and total capital raised.

ShapeShift moves closer to full decentralization with open-source mobile app

October 19, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The organization transitioned to a DAO in July 2021 as part of a broader pledge to decentralize its operations.

ShapeShift, a noncustodial crypto exchange and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), has taken additional steps toward complete decentralization by migrating users to a new open-source application — a move the organization said would enhance user mobility.

The organization announced that as of Oct. 19, all native web users of the ShapeShift platform have migrated to a decentralized version of the application. The announcement also coincided with the release of a new mobile app that the organization said would provide an “authentic DeFi universe” experience. The new mobile app is said to provide users with additional flexibility, mobility and features when connecting their wallets and trading crypto.

Willy Orgorzaly, who heads decentralization for the Fox Foundation — which oversees the ShapeShift DAO — said the mobile app is “fully open source” and that “the only backend is blockchain data,” which is also in the process of being decentralized.

As part of its decentralization efforts, ShapeShift has expanded user options for investing and managing digital assets. It has also pledged to permanently erase users’ data once the company’s centralized infrastructure is fully wound down.

Self-custody.

Decentralization.

Immutability.

Each requires the former.

This is the way.
— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) June 16, 2021

As reported by Cointelegraph, ShapeShift announced its plans to decentralize its entire operations in July 2021. The decentralization pledge also included a massive airdrop of FOX tokens, the native asset of the ShapeShift platform, to over 1 million users. In the following months, the organization issued multiple airdrops and fully open-sourced its v2 platform code.

While decentralization has been at the heart of the Bitcoin (BTC) revolution, the crypto industry does not uniformly accept the concept or apply it effectively. New efforts to promote decentralization have emerged within Web3, a broad concept that refers to some future iteration of the internet.