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StarkNet makes Cairo 1.0 open source in first step toward community control

November 25, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Cairo

StarkNet has prioritized scalability over composability and transparency. But it’s now working on making its tech open source.

Zero-knowledge (ZK)-Rollup tech company StarkWare has officially open sourced its new programming language compiler, Cairo 1.0, which will soon be supported on Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution StarkNet in Q1 2023.

The news was announced by StarkWare — the company behind StarkNet — in a Nov. 25 Twitter post. StarkWare’s rollup technology and recursive proofs offer the potential to compress millions of transactions on L2 into a single transaction on Ethereum, however the project has been criticized for maintaining control over its IP, not least of all by its more open source focused competitor zkSync.

StarkWare described open sourcing Cairo as a “milestone move” in its quest to hand over more control and intellectual property rights to its community and developers. Cairo is a programming language written specifically to harness the power of zk rollups and validity proofs.

The day has come: a first look into Cairo 1.0, fully open-source

This is a big step towards open-sourcing the StarkNet stack

You can now get familiar with the new syntax, compile and run simple programs locally. #StarkNet support is coming soonhttps://t.co/0tdZDhopEP
— StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) November 24, 2022

StarkWare stated that developers can now experiment with Cairo 1.0 by compiling and executing simple applications until it is fully supported on StarkNet in Q1 2023.

At that point Cairo 1.0 will enable faster feature development and allow for more community involvement, according to Starkware Exploration Lead and former Ethereum core developer Abdelhamid Bakhta.

“We’re continuing to open source the StarkNet tech stack, beginning with Cairo 1.0. We’re doing this in order to fulfill StarkNet's vision as a public good that anyone can use, and that the community can constantly improve,” he said.

“On a practical level this maximizes transparency about our code, and our coding process. And it strengthens the community’s ability to find bugs and improve the compiler. With each aspect of the tech stack that is open sourced, this sense of community involvement will grow and grow.”

Once in production, Cairo 1.0 will also enable blockchain developers to write and deploy smart contracts to StarkNet, according to StarkWare’s Medium post.

StarkWare added that because Cairo 1.0 makes every computation “provable,” StarkNet’s censorship resistance properties will be strengthened and it’ll also be better positioned to respond to Denial-of-Service attacks.

StarkWare’s STARK tech stack powers a number of Web3 projects including decentralized exchange (DEX) platform dYdX (although this is moving to its own chain on Cosmos), NFT-platform Immutable X and blockchain interoperability protocol Celer Network.

StarkNet has taken a gamble by using Cairo to speed up its solution, which is not natively compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). However Ethereum software tooling firm Nethermind built a transpiler called Warp that converts Solidity code into Cairo code.

Competitor zkSync’s EVM-compatible mainnet is in the process of being launched.

But despite taking a more difficult path, StarkWare founder Eli Ben-Sasson recently told Cointelegraph that using custom built programming language like Cairo, as opposed to Solidity, was the only viable way to take full advantage of Ethereum scaling afforded by ZK rollups:

“I’m willing to bet that you won’t see a full blown ZK EVM that can put a million transactions inside a single proof on Ethereum. As we can easily do today and have been doing for months and years.”

The news comes as Starkware also recently deployed the new StarkNet token (STRK) on Ethereum on Nov. 17, which will be used for staking and voting purposes in addition to paying fees on the network.

L2 is crucial to Ethereum decentralization, censorship resistance, says researcher

November 9, 2022 Coin Telegraph

board

Swedish researcher Eric Wall highlighted StarkNet’s influence on Ethereum’s scalability as he joins the board of the newly formed StarkNet Foundation.

Ethereum layer-2 scaling platform StarkWare has officially launched the StarkNet Foundation with the introduction of a diverse board that aims to safeguard Ethereum's decentralization and censorship resistance.

Seven individuals, including key members from the Ethereum ecosystem and wider cryptocurrency space, will head up the non-profit entity. An announcement shared with Cointelegraph outlined the role of the StarkNet Foundation in ensuring the maintenance and security of StarkNet’s network as well as its development and expansion.

Cointelegraph reached out to Eric Wall to unpack his appointment to the Foundation's board. Wall is a blockchain researcher and whistleblower who has exposed systemic flaws in high-profile cryptocurrency projects. Wall also acts as an advisor on cryptocurrency to the Human Rights Foundation.

Wall highlighted systemic efforts to help Ethereum continue scaling through layer-2 innovations as key to the ongoing success of the smart contract blockchain network:

“Since Ethereum is the most important DeFi chain we have, I care a lot about making sure that it sticks to the ethos of decentralization and censorship resistance. This battle is fought at the baselayer, but must also be fought at the layers above.”

Wall told Cointelegraph that his motivation to join the Foundation was to ensure that ‘one of Ethereum’s most important second layers’ did not neglect the ethos of the underlying blockchain:

“StarkWare is probably the most important player in the ecosystem in pioneering validity proof systems that many believe are absolutely central to Ethereum’s scalability endgame, and StarkNet is the general-purpose platform leveraging that technology”

Wall highlighted the Foundation’s role in managing relationships with ecosystem partners and developers as well as allocating grants. This includes ensuring partnerships are in the best interest of StarkNet users and are aligned with ‘the fundamental ethos of neutral open-source engineering’.

The Foundation will also focus on StarkNet technology education to help developers learn how to build Decentralized Applications (DApps) using StarkWare’s proprietary STARKs (Scalable, Transparent ARgument of Knowledge) proof system.

The Foundation's board also includes StarkWare CEO and co-founder Uri Kolodny and StarkWare’s president, co-founder and computer scientist Eli Ben-Sasson. Computer scientist and StarkNet advisor Shubhangi Saraf, blockchain developer and Nethermind founder Tomasz Stańczak, former United States deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin and award-winning lawyer Heather Meeker make up the rest of the leadership group.

As previously reported, StarkNet is a decentralized layer-2 validity rollup that aims to scale the Ethereum network while maintaining its security and decentralization. It addresses what is known as the ‘blockchain trilemma’ coined by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

The StarkNet Foundation will manage 50.1% of the ecosystem’s initial token supply to guide the network’s allocation of resources. The funds will be used to support StarkNet’s community of users, developers and researchers, which contribute to the ecosystem by creating infrastructure, tools and applications.

Decentralized exchange Uniswap v3 gets ‘Warp’ed’ onto StarkNet

October 10, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Cairo

Ethereum-native projects like Uniswap that are written in Solidity can now be transpiled to StarkNet via Nethermind’s new ‘Warp’ project

Ethereum development company Nethermind has announced it has “transpiled and compiled” decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap v3 on “Warp” — a project designed to allow Ethereum users to swap tokens on the more scalable Ethereum layer-2 network StarkNet.

The milestone was announced by team lead Jorik Schellekens in an Oct. 9 Medium post.

Nethermind describes Warp as a “Solidity to Cairo Transpiler” which enables Ethereum-based projects written in Solidity to transition its codebase onto StarkNet, allowing them to capitalize on cheaper fees.

Transpiling is the process of taking source code written in one programming language and transforming it into another language that has a similar level of abstraction.

In this case, Warp transpiles Solidity code to Cairo — the programming language used to write applications on StarkNet.

The Warp plugin is still technically under development according to Schellekens, but he added that Nethermind will soon have “Uniswap’s entire test suite running against a Uniswap implementation deployed on StarkNet.”

The milestone came following StarkNet’s new “contract creation from other contracts” capability, which is what enabled Warp to successfully transpile and deploy every Solidity file from Uniswap v3.

Schellekens noted the significance of this feat given the sheer size of Uniswap’s codebase, allowing projects of all sizes to get onto StarkNet.

“With Warp rapidly maturing, the barrier to entry for large and small projects alike to test out the capabilities of StarkNet is lowering.”

But Warp’s Solidity to Cairo translation hasn't been picture-perfect. Warp’s GitHub shows that there are still a number of Solidity functions that Nethermind developers haven’t figured out how to add to Cairo, while a few other key functions will either require “developer intervention” or will “likely never be supported” at all.

Nethermind said that they plan on advancing Warp’s features further to bring more Ethereum-based projects to StarkNet.

"We will continue working hard on features and repeat this experiment with a few other protocols, bringing new protocols to StarkNet at warp speed."

StarkWare, the company behind StarkNet, teamed up with Nethermind in Jul. 2021 to help build advanced features and infrastructure elements for StarkNet.

Nethermind and Warp are not affiliated with the decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap.

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60 million NFTs could be minted in a single transaction: StarkWare founder

August 8, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The StarkWare founder announced the launch of its new Recursive validity proof technology on Aug. 7 in Seoul.

Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup tech company StarkWare founder Eli Ben-Sasson says its new Recursive validity proofs could theoretically roll up as many as 60 million transactions into one on the Ethereum blockchain.

The zkSTARK co-inventor made the comments to Cointelegraph during ETH Seoul on Aug. 7 after announcing the start of production of StarkWare’s new Recursive validity proof technology during a presentation.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson said that recursive validity proofs could further scale up transaction throughput to a factor of at least ten compared to standard Validium scaling, noting that they’ve already been rolling up 600,000 mints of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the ImmutableX protocol.

“I would say the minimum I would say is 10x [...] We've been putting 600,000 mints of NFTs, which resulted in a 10 gas per mint. We can now at the very least take 10 of such proofs and generate a recursive proof of all 10 of these things,” he explained.

“We could go to six million at the very least, and this is in the near term. That's something that would be very easy to do. ”

However, Ben-Sasson also added the number could “go up to 60 million with more engineering and tweaking," adding:

“I think also reducing the latency by another factor that's 5 to 10x is also very doable.”

StarkNet is a permissionless and decentralized layer-2 ZK-rollup that uses Validium to scale transactions. Like standard ZK-Rollups, Validiums work by aggregating thousands of transactions into a single transaction. StarkNet’s new Recursive validity proof technology can batch up several Validium blocks into a single proof.

This scaling solution could be a game-changer for Ethereum as layer-2 scaling solutions like ZK-Rollups and StarkNet’s Recursive validity proofs can offload much of the network congestion and data availability issues that have caused trouble on the Ethereum Mainnet. Currently, Ethereum’s Mainnet can process transactions at a rate of 12-15 transactions per second (TPS).

During his presentation at ETH Seoul, Ben-Sasson noted that recursion is great for scaling as it lowers gas costs, has higher proof capacity, and offers lower latency.

Starknet just turned on recursion for their production SHARP systems. Recursive proving can drastically decrease the amortized cost per transaction on L1, and introduces a secure STARK-based model for layer 3. It’s exciting to witness the profound scaling solutions rolling out.
— g.mirror.xyz (@strangechances) August 7, 2022

StarkNet has been live on Ethereum Mainnet since June 2020. It currently powers protocols including dYdX, Immutable, DeversiFi, and Celer.

Also speaking at ETH Seoul on Sunday, Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his enthusiasm towards ZK-rollups, further stating that the scaling solution was superior to Optimistic Rollups:

“In the longer term, ZK-Rollups are eventually going to beat Optimistic Rollups because they have these fundamental advantages, like not needing to have a seven-day withdrawal period.”

To date, the Ethereum-based scaling solutions with the most total value locked (TVL) are Arbitrum, Optimism, dYdX, and Loopring.

StarkNet