The Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 scaling project Starknet plans to kick off its first token allocation this month. In a new announcement, the project notes it will distribute more than 700 million Starknet tokens (STRK) to nearly 1.3 million addresses starting on February 20th. Eligible individuals and groups will have four months to claim their tokens, […]
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The Devonomics initiative from the Starknet Foundation aims to return a portion of network fees to incentivize developers.
Layer-2 network StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation are set to distribute a 10% cut of network fees to developers, a part of a pilot program called “Devonomics.”
In an announcement shared with Cointelegraph on Dec. 12, StarkWare CEO Uri Kolodny said it was allocating a portion of the network fees, provisionally 8%, to decentralized app builders and 2% to infrastructure engineers and core developers through a transparent and open voting process.
“It’s all about giving the hands-on builders a strong voice in shaping the network,” explained Kolodny.
The Starknet Foundation is warning community members to be on the lookout for scams relating to circulating screenshots of early iterations of a token distribution portal.
The Starknet Foundation has moved quickly to quash speculation around screenshots of early iterations of a distribution portal for the upcoming launch of its native SRTK ecosystem token.
Information shared with Cointelegraph ahead of an announcement on X (formerly Twitter) outlined that the Foundation is still developing plans to distribute the token to certain users, contributors, and investors. The Ethereum layer 2 scaling network previously outlined initial plans for the Starknet token design in July 2022.
We have seen that a preview of an iteration of a possible provisions portal has been shared on social media.
— Starknet Foundation (@StarknetFndn) December 1, 2023
Screenshots disseminated online have been labeled “draft plans that are still under development.” A spokesperson from StarkWare told Cointelegraph that details of official criteria and the provision mechanism of STRK tokens will be shared once the company has finalized them:
“The cut-off for any criteria used to determine who may receive tokens or how many tokens is in the past, and no actions or activity now can impact eligibility in any way.”
The company also stressed that community members should be acutely aware of scams that will look to take advantage of any uncertainty around the STRK token distribution.
Related: Ethereum L2 Starknet aims to decentralize core components of its scaling network
A number of different X users reposted screenshots of the early iterations of the Starknet token provisions portal and further information that alluded to certain requirements to receive STRK tokens.
Starknet has laid out its roadmap to begin decentralizing core components of its Ethereum L2 scaling network to defend against censorship and improve robustness.
Ethereum layer-2 scaling network Starknet has outlined plans to improve the decentralization of three core components of its zero-knowledge (ZK) proof rollup solution.
Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph, Starknet product manager and blockchain researcher Ilia Volokh outlined the firm’s intent to address certain centralized elements of its protocol aimed at defending against censorship and making its system more robust.
Starknet operates as a validity rollup using ZK-proof technology to bundle transactions, with cryptographic proofs submitted to Ethereum to achieve security and finality for layer-2 transactions.
According to Volokh, Starknet’s protocol remains dependent on StarkWare for creating L2 blocks, computing proofs and initiating layer-1 state updates to the Ethereum blockchain.
“In this sense, the operation of the network is centralized. This is not necessarily a bad thing because although Starkware operates the network, it cannot steal money and can’t do any invalid state transitions because they require executing the verifier on Ethereum,” Volokh explained.
While Starkware remains a “centralized gateway” to enter Starknet, Volokh added that the protocol is “100% honest” and cannot falsify transactions or information, as Ethereum’s layer-1 blockchain acts as a filter.
The only tangible way in which Starknet can “misbehave” is either by being idle in not relaying proofs to Ethereum or by specifically censoring certain parties from including transactions or proofs.
“For example, if the sequencer decides to exclude a transaction from a particular entity, they’re free to do so. As long as the other things that they are trying to promote are valid.”
For Starknet, the latter consideration is part of the main reason to decentralize parts of its protocol in an effort to combat two main causes of censorship in consensus-based systems.
Intentional censorship is one consideration, while “non-robust” systems that have a single point of failure present another threat to decentralization, given that all network participants would be “censored” if this central point caused a network or system outage.
“We want to solve both of these problems, and we think the obvious solution to both of them at the same time is to have as many people operating Starknet as possible.”
Decentralizing these different components of Starknet’s system entails varying degrees of difficulty. This includes decentralizing block production through its consensus protocol, decentralizing the proving layer, which is in charge of computing proofs for blocks and decentralizing the process of L1 state updates.
“I want to emphasize that it’s crucial to decentralize each of them because as long as even one of them is centralized, you haven’t achieved much,” Volokh added before unpacking the relevant challenges of each component.
Decentralizing block production has been fairly straightforward given that all blockchains rely on a consensus protocol and sybil-resistance mechanism. Meanwhile, decentralizing Starknet’s prover has required a more novel approach.
“As far as I know, we’re the first rollup that has come out with a fairly complete and concrete solution,” Volokh said. He also went on to unpack how competing ZK-rollups all essentially aggregate transactions into proofs and post them on Ethereum, which by extension transfers its own decentralization to rollup solutions.
However, these systems all rely on respective central entities to create and prove blocks, which means these layer 2s are “equally centralized.” Whether end users are concerned about the philosophical implications of the centralized components of L2s is another conversation altogether for Volokh:
“The people who appreciate decentralization do so because they understand that it gives more security, and we share those values more than we think people will like them for commercial reasons.”
Volokh added that Starknet is still in the process of outlining the process of testing and implementing these decentralized mechanics in its network. This is likely to be carried out through a series of interconnected testnets to test the simultaneous functionality of the different components.
Magazine: Here’s how Ethereum’s ZK-rollups can become interoperable
Monthly active developers across the crypto ecosystem fell 28% year-on-year in October, though some have managed to buck the trend.
Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions Starknet and zkSync are among the few platforms to have increased their total monthly active developer counts over the last 12 months, data shows.
While Starknet and zkSync only recorded increases of 3% and 6% respectively, the likes of Ethereum, Polygon and Solana saw their counts fa by 23%, 43% and 57% respectively over the same timeframe, according to an updated developer report by Electric Capital, which provided data up to Oct. 1.
Total monthly active developers fell 27.7% from 26,701 developers to 19,279, reflecting a wider downward trend in developers over the last 12 months.
Chainlink, Stellar, Aztec Protocol and Ripple also increased their developer counts as of Oct. 1, though their total monthly active developers were lower than zkSync and Starknet.
StarkWare’s Starknet and Matter Labs’ zkSync are layer 2 solutions aimed at scaling Ethereum through zero-knowledge rollups, which have become a focal point in 2023.
Much of Starknet’s focus of late has revolved around its “Quantum Leap” — which went live in July. It can theoretically increase Ethereum’s TPS (transactions per second) from around 13-15 to 37 TPS consistently and up to 90 TPS in some cases.
Starknet and zkSync have also been working on zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) solutions to further scale Ethereum throughout 2023.
Developers at zkSync have also been building a network of “Hyperchains” to create an ecosystem of interoperable protocols and sovereign chains as part of its zero-knowledge tech stack. The firm unveiled the solution in June and hope to have a working version of it by end of 2023.
Related: 48% fewer new crypto coders last year: Report
In a thread on X on Oct. 18, Electric Capital software engineer Enrique Herreros noted many of the departing active monthly developers were “newcomers” (less than one year), while the more “established” (more than two years) and “emerging” (one to two years) developers have remained relatively steady over the last 12 months:
“We can see a decrease of -58% in Newcomers, a moderate increase of +11% Emerging Developers and a slight increase of +5% Established Developers,” Enrique said.
.@electriccapital’s Developer October Update is here! This is a lighter weight update as we prepare for our annual report.
— Enrique ⚡ (@eherrerosj) October 18, 2023
We inspected 164M+ crypto commits to find:
• 19.3K monthly active open source developers as of October 1, 2023
• Developers have decreased -27% YoY
•… pic.twitter.com/bHyMHx29El
Enrique noted this is a cyclical trend where newcomers dominate the developer market during bull markets but then fall in numbers when prices begin to plummet.
Electric Capital typically obtains its data from code repos and code commits on open-source developer platform GitHub.
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Starknet's latest upgrade will scale the ZK rollup's throughput by 50X or more. But capacity is very different to real world usage.
Starknet’s Quantum Leap upgrade has been deployed on testnet, with the Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol claiming it's capable of processing "hundreds of transactions per second."
If achieved, it would be at least a 50X improvement from its current throughput, thanks to the Version 12 upgrade harmonizing how the sequencer's code interacts with the Cairo programming language.
A Starknet fact sheet states that the "time to inclusion" after the upgrade goes live on mainnet "will be under 15 seconds" meaning DApps will be able to confirm transactions on-chain within seconds.
Co-founder Uri Kolodny was a little more circumspect in an interview with Cointelegraph, stating that the upgrade has hit "triple figures" during testing so far.
If this throughput is mirrored in real-world usage — and high TPS is as much a function of demand from users as technical capability — the upgrade would be a huge leap for Israeli firm StarkWare's decentralized scaling network.
According to L2Beat, Starknet is currently processing just 1.79 TPS, meaning the upgrade could improve transaction speed by 56X or more. It would also easily outshine other Ethereum L2s including the OP mainnet (6 TPS), zkSync Era (8.63 TPS) and Arbitrum One (9.69 TPS), not to mention Ethereum itself (12.29 TPS).
But to put those TPS figures in perspective, it's still a lot less than Solana's 4127 TPS or Visa's 1700 TPS.
"Scaling has been the primary challenge that this ecosystem has been fighting with over the past several years," Kolodny said.
"We believe that Version 12 brings with it this Quantum Leap — in fact there are a whole series of leaps that will roll out through the summer we'll go through. But we are already in the triple digits for transactions per second."
Capacity is very different to usage however, and even after the upgrade if there are not enough users on Starknet that actually make 100 transactions per second, then the protocol will not run at 100 TPS.
Kolodny added that raw TPS is not the best metric of performance, given that complicated transactions are harder to perform than simple ones. But he said the upgrade also enables complicated transactions to make multiple calls "each performing separate logic from a separate contract."
"In terms of Cairo steps per second, we're observing an increase of at least something on the order of 50X compared to what we have today."
Zero Barriers podcast series: Crypto adoption fueled by ZK-rollups
The Quantum Leap upgrade does not solve the data availability problem faced by all ZK rollups. The issue is that there is not enough room on Ethereum to write back all of the required data for the transactions on L2s, which pushes up costs.
As of now, 90% of costs on Starknet are associated with Data availability cost to L1.
— Starknet (@Starknet) June 7, 2023
Ackktually, Starknet will be the first L2 to offer Volition, and reduce fees by up to 85% post its launch later this year.
Moreover, the implementation of EIP4844 on L1 will further lower it.
Kolodny said this would be addressed by the Version 13 Volition upgrade , which is due before the end of this quarter. It will give users granular control that enables them to store crucial or high value data on Ethereum, and less important data elsewhere. This is projected to cut fees by 85% and could pave the way for low fee micropayments or a boom in affordable and fast blockchain gaming.
One of the key components of the upgrade is Cairo-rs, which is a faster implementation of the Cairo virtual machine using Rust instead of Python from venture studio LambdaClass.
Founder Federico Carrone said Quantum Leap was a "historic moment" for blockchains in general.
"This release shows that it's possible to scale blockchains in a safe way thanks to STARKs and enables the creation of new applications that were impossible to think of a few years ago on top of a blockchain."
StarkWare previously announced on June 29 that its validity proof ZK scaling technology had now facilitated more than $1 trillion in transactions.
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With fresh funding under its belt, a new zkEVM is set to go to testnet in August, allowing developers to write in any EVM-compatible language on Starknet.
Starknet, a zero knowledge layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum is one step closer to becoming fully Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible pending an August testnet launch of Kakarot, a new zkEVM.
On June 3, the Kakarot team announced it had received new backing from Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin, Ledger co-founder Nicholas Bacca and Starkware.
We have powered up and entered Super Saiyan mode⚡. Kakarot Labs has officially been incorporated and closed a pre-seed round with top-tier investors.
— Kakarot zkEVM (@KakarotZkEvm) June 2, 2023
Let’s unpack our vision, current standing, and the exciting future ahead. pic.twitter.com/VI8QRdPLfw
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Kakarot CEO and Co-Founder Elias Tazartes explained that while Starknet stands as a leading Zero Knowledge roll-up in the Ethereum ecosystem, it's not EVM compatible, so there’s “kind of a barrier to entry.”
Starknet is used by developers to scale decentralized applications, transactions and computation on Ethereum, but uses its own native language Cairo. According to Starknet, the use of Cairo makes it easier and faster to develop, review and maintain new code.
The downside is that it isn’t EVM compatible, which could dissuade some developers.
“The greatest impact that Kakarot can have is to make Starknet EVM compatible.”
“Kakarot right now is like a Solidity or any language engine. Eventually you will be able to put that engine within Starknet to make it EVM compatible.”
At present, Starknet runs its own custom smart contract Virtual Machine dubbed “Cairo VM” that leverages its native coding language Cairo. This means that Starknet doesn’t have direct EVM compatibility out of the box, something that could prove to be a significant hurdle for overall rollup performance.
“Some teams really need to be able to use Solidity. For example, if someone wrote a DEX or an AMM for the Ethereum ecosystem and now has 60,000 lines of code already audited, ready to go, but it’s only on EVM chains.”
If these developers wanted to start using Starknet they would have to hire a whole new dev team, write in, audit the code again and maintain two code bases, becoming what Tazartes describes as “prohibitively expensive.”
Related: More TPS, less gas: Ethereum L2 Starknet outlines performance upgrades
According to Tazartes, the idea for the zkEVM was first floated during a Starkware conference in July 2022. By October, the development team was able to together for a week during a hacker house event in Lisbon, Portugal to get cracking on the new zkEVM.
Two months and 20 days later in December, the coding for the project was complete, arriving at a fully functional execution layer — all of which was achieved without any venture funding.
Notably, Tazartes said that Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buteirn later invested in Kakarot due to his enthusiasm toward a multiple-zkEVM approach to building out the Ethereum ecosystem.
“For Vitalik, the more zkEVMs the better, because as long as you have a wide diversity of architecture and diversity of approaches…then this is really good for the space as a whole.”
Tazartes shared that the testnet version of Kakarot will be launched for public use in August this year.
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Starknet makes performance improvements top priority in 2023, aiming to increase throughput, lower latency and reduce transaction costs.
Layer-2 blockchain protocols have been in the spotlight in 2023, bringing major performance improvements to a variety of platforms and services operating in the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem.
Zero-knowledge proofs have been key in the roll-out of a variety of layer 2s, with the technology pioneered by the decentralized scaling network Starknet. StarkWare, the technology firm behind the scaling platform, has outlined plans to further improve its layer-2 network to meet an expected increase in users and developers through the rest of the year.
Cointelegraph caught up with Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of StarkWare, to unpack key points set out in a 2023 roadmap for Starknet. Chief among a list of to-dos is performance improvements that are centered around higher throughput and reduced latency of Starknet’s network.
Ben-Sasson highlighted the focus on performance upgrades that are expected to deliver significantly higher transactions per second (TPS) than on Ethereum’s mainnet at lower gas costs:
“The most important thing is for builders and developers to have high throughput so that they can really build. Starknet is about increasing the computational abilities of Ethereum and we just want to provide this raw power to the hands of developers.”
Starknet v0.12.0 is expected to be released in the next month and is the culmination of a six-month sprint that involves transitioning Starknet’s development stack to a Rust-based Sequencer as well as an open-source project that has built a Rust-Cairo VM (virtual-machine).
StarkWare open-sourced its programming language compiler Cairo early in 2023, with the language aimed at driving the development of zk-rollup and validity proof-powered decentralized applications (DApps).
Related: Privacy, scaling drives use cases for zero-knowledge technology
Ben-Sasson added that Starknet continues to chase an ambitious target of processing at least 10 times the throughput of Ethereum at a tenth of the cost. He highlighted StarkEx’s ability to deliver significant TPS on decentralized exchange dYdX. StarkEx is another layer-2 scaling engine developed by StarkWare.
At times, dYdX processes up to 54 transactions per second, while the average TPS of Ethereum is around 10 to 12. Ben-Sasson also noted that these dYdX transactions are roughly four to five times larger than those on Ethereum, which bodes well for the improved scaling capabilities of Starknet in the near future:
“We're often experiencing practical TPS or gas usage that is orders of magnitude greater than what Ethereum can deal with. I'm very confident that this will also be replicated on Starknet.”
Performance improvements have been prioritized as a result of developer and user feedback highlighting delays in transaction processing on Starknet. The next port of call is the reduction of transaction costs which will be addressed by targeting the cost of storing data on Ethereum’s mainnet.
“We're going to roll out Volition, which allows users to opt as to whether they want their data on or off-chain and this will be part of the base layer of the Starknet system.”
Ben-Sasson said the release of off-chain data availability will complement Ethereum’s in-development improvement proposal ‘Proto-Danksharding’ EIP-4844, which will introduce a new type of transaction that carries binary large objects or ‘blobs’. The EIP fundamentally aims to provide cheaper transactions.
Starknet is also aiming to deliver faster finality further down the 2023 roadmap, which will produce shorter and fixed interval block times on the network. This will be carried out with the introduction of a fee market to prioritize Starknet’s network resources on users’ willingness to pay for transactions, inspired by conventional market systems:
“Market mechanisms are a very good way to solve this. Blockchain didn't invent this, blockchains adopted this from just the conventional world. That's how you prioritize resources and allow users to signal this.”
A number of Ethereum layer-2 protocols have begun rolling out zk-rollups to further improve efforts to provide faster and cheaper transactions to the smart contract blockchain network. This includes the likes of Polygon and ConsenSys.
Magazine: Here’s how Ethereum’s ZK-rollups can become interoperable
The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has announced the deployment of Base, an Ethereum layer two (L2) scaling network, after developers launched the Base testnet on Thursday. The company said it is incubating Base within Coinbase and that the L2 chain will progressively decentralize over time. Coinbase L2 Scaling Platform Aims to Help Scale the Crypto Economy […]
Ethereum layer-2 scaling platform StarkNet has revamped its Cairo programming language to enable easier onboarding of new developers.
Ethereum layer-2 scaling platform StarkNet has overhauled its in-house Cairo coding language to make Web3 development accessible to developers.
An announcement shared with Cointelegraph outlined the upgrades to Cairo 1.0, which is touted to emulate characteristics of the popular programming language Rust. The overhaul intends to allow developers with general coding experience to begin building decentralized applications on StarkNet’s Ethereum layer-2 network.
StarkWare co-founder and president Eli Ben-Sasson told Cointelegraph that making layer-2 development more accessible to developers of varying backgrounds was the main reason for Cairo’s revamp:
“Primary drivers were safety and ease of use, and conducting the overhaul presented a terrific opportunity to remove the entry for developers with conventional language backgrounds.”
Technical specifications outlined in the Jan. 5 launch encompass a host of improvements to Cairo’s language. This includes improved syntax and language constructs, a holistic type system, intuitive libraries, optimized code and strong typing by demanding specification of data types.
StarkNet highlights Sierra as the main addition to Cairo’s overhaul, which stands for Safe Intermediate Representation. Sierra acts as a new intermediate representation layer between Cairo 1.0 and Cairo byte code.
As Ben Sasson explained, Sierra is an important aspect of ensuring a permissionless network. The upgrade enables reverted transactions to be included in StarkNet blocks, helping the protocol to avoid adding complex ‘crypto-economic mechanisms.’
Related: StarkNet makes Cairo 1.0 open source in first step toward community control
Ben Sasson said that Sierra will allow StarkNet to ‘inherit the full censorship-resistance of Ethereum’ and mainly protects against Sequencer Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson pioneered ZK-STARK cryptography alongside other computer scientists. Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge is a proof system that encrypts and verifies transaction data to provide security, scalability and resistance to quantum computing.
According to StarkNet, Cairo is the fourth most popular smart contract language by total value locked. It is the base of applications that have processed over 300 million transactions, minted 90 million NFTs and facilitated $790 million worth of trades settled on Ethereum.
