Cardano-Bitcoin bridge may be first step to true Bitcoin DeFi

November 18, 2024 Coin Telegraph

Starknet will increase TPS 4X and reduce fees 5X within 3 months: CEO

November 17, 2024 Coin Telegraph

Starkware Aims to Scale Bitcoin Using Zero-Knowledge Technology

June 4, 2024 Bitcoin.com

StarkWare launches $1M research fund for ZK Bitcoin scaling

June 4, 2024 Coin Telegraph

Starknet to hand 10% of network fees to devs, with $3.5M in first distribution

December 12, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Starknet token distribution not yet finalized, despite speculation over portal screenshots

December 1, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

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.

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 and zkSync buck trend as crypto ecosystems shed devs by 28%

October 19, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Active Monthly Developers

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.

*Monthly active developers in the cryptocurrency ecosystem since 2015. Source: Electric Capital*

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.

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.

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 ⚡ (@eherrerosj) October 18, 2023

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.

Magazine: Make 500% from ChatGPT stock tips? Bard leans left, $100M AI memecoin: AI Eye

Ethereum layer 2 zkEVM ‘Scroll’ confirms mainnet launch

October 17, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Blockchain data from Etherscan suggest Scroll’s mainnet was live over a week ago.

Scroll, a new contender in the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) space that works to scale the blockchain, has confirmed the launch of its mainnet.

The team behind Scroll announced the launch in an Oct. 17 post and added that existing applications and developer tool kits on Ethereum can now migrate to the new scaling solution.

“Everything functions right out of the box,” the Scroll team said.

After more than two years of building, we are thrilled to announce the launch of Scroll Mainnet.

As we open the doors to Mainnet, we want to take a moment to reflect on our journey thus far pic.twitter.com/WKfkjyIkB0
— Scroll (@Scroll_ZKP) October 17, 2023

A zkEVM solution such as Scroll’s aims to provide lower transaction costs at a higher throughput for decentralized applications running on Ethereum.

It works by batching thousands of transactions off-chain into one, then submitting a proof consisting of a minimal data summary to Ethereum’s mainnet.

Blockchain data suggests Scroll had withheld the news that its mainnet was live since Oct. 8 — the date at which the first smart contract was deployed on thScroll mainnet, according to Etherscan data.

Scroll said the mainnet launch came after 15 months of extensive testing and security audits across three separate testnets.

“Our bridge and rollup contracts were audited by OpenZeppelin and Zellic,” Scroll added. Its zkEVM circuits were reviewed by Trail of Bits, Zellic, and KALOS.

Across its three testnets over 450,000 smart contracts were deployed enabling over 90 million transactions across 9 million blocks. 280,000 ZK-proofs were also generated the firm said.

pic.twitter.com/BujREyNGqi
— Scroll (@Scroll_ZKP) October 17, 2023

About a month ago, Scroll co-founder Ye Zhang told Cointelegraph Scroll would launch with centralized features but plans to increasingly decentralize over time.

“We will have a centralized sequencer and the central approver button,” Zhang said. He added a plan is in place to remove that button, however.

“We have a roadmap [...] To solve the single point of failure and to incentivize the community to build better proving hardware.”

Zhang said the Scroll team will also pitch several proposals to let the community discuss what’s best for Scroll moving forward.

Scroll was founded in 2021 with the goal to be more community-driven. Other zkEVM solutions working to scale Ethereum include Polygon, zkSync, StarkWare and Immutable.

Jordi Baylina, technical lead of Polygon Hermez zkEVM, recently told Cointelegraph that such competition in the zkEVM space is only going to make the Ethereum ecosystem more robust:

“Having different projects adds a lot of experience, and it’s also a way to test different approaches, ways of handling things or solving things,” he said.

Magazine: Attack of the zkEVMs! Crypto’s 10x moment

StarkWare, Herodotus launch tech to verify data from any point in Ethereum’s history

September 1, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Storage Proofs could prove useful for services like account recovery tapping into the ability to access and verify historical Ethereum data.

A new zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof) technology is set to improve the ability to access and verify historical data from the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, with deep chain validation cited as a usability barrier of the network.

Technology firm Herodotus has released its on-chain accumulator which uses storage proof cryptography, allowing users to verify data from any point of Ethereum’s blockchain without the need of a third-party. The solution makes use of StarkWare’s STARK proving, the ZK-proof technology co-invented by mathematician Eli Ben-Sasson.

StarkWare presented Herodotus with a custom built instance of its shared prover service SHARP, which enables advanced scaling efficiency using recursive proofs. The latter allows for a virtual machine to provide “proofs of proofs”, by generating proofs of transactions or blocks in parallel and real time and batching them into a subsequent proof.

At a slightly more technical level, the accumulator acts as a cache that stores block headers. If the accumulator has a header in its cache, the respective storage proof computation can use it for validation.

A visual representation of the possible use of recursive proofs to batchs a variety of information into subsequent verified and cached proofs. Source: StarkWare.

If the header is not cached, then the prover has to generate a proof to cover the requested block range, add the block header to the accumulator and then complete the requested storage proof computation.

As the name suggests, the on-chain accumulator essentially accumulates proofs that roll-up prior proofs, drastically reducing the time it takes to verify the Ethereum blockchain and associated data at any point in the network’s history.

Herodotus chief technology officer Marcello Bardus notes that the technology removes the need to traverse the entire blockchain on the blockchain itself:

“We can do it off chain, generate an accumulator and just cherrypick one specific block without iterating from the entire chain on the chain itself.”

Starkware notes that Storage Proofs could prove to be groundbreaking as an alternative to cross-chain bridges that need to rely on third-party oracles to track and verify data.

Herodotus co-founder Kacper Koziol added that the accumulator is an innovation that Ethereum has long needed to align with blockchain principles of transparency and accessibility. The technology will essentially allow any use to access any point in Ethereum’s history.

“This will be very powerful. For the first time in the history of blockchains people are going to be able to prove the correctness of any aspect of anyone’s on-chain information.”

The two teams highlight the potential for storage proofs to build “Web2 equivalent applications” tapping into the pioneering ability to access and verify Ethereum blockchain data autonomously.

Account recovery is touted as one potential use case, where the ability to verify on-chain data could be used to trigger a proverbial dead man’s switch, or to automate insurance protocols that use historical on-chain events to trigger smart contract payouts.

Magazine: Recursive inscriptions: Bitcoin ‘supercomputer’ and BTC DeFi coming soon

Zero Barriers ahead! Zero knowledge and AI combine to redefine the future

July 20, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The fourth episode sees StarkWare president Eli Ben-Sasson and Giza co-founder Cem Dagdelen explore the role of AI in smart contracts.

From the international stage at Davos to the soccer fields of Bedford, the Decentralize with Cointelegraph podcast dives into the nuances of crypto and blockchain, and how they intersect with everyday life.

One promising technology that has emerged in the blockchain space is zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs), which many claim can be a game-changer for blockchain tech and how smart contracts are implemented.

Zero Barriers is a special six-part series launched in the first week of July on the Decentralize with Cointelegraph podcast to explore this innovative technology. In the fourth episode, Andrew Fenton, managing editor of Cointelegraph Magazine, sits down with some of the individuals behind ZK-rollups to talk about how these solutions have developed and changed the blockchain space over the past few years.

This episode features Eli Ben-Sasson, a co-founder and chief architect of StarkWare, who has been at the forefront of the technology since validity proofs were an abstract theoretical concept to StarkNet’s superfast Quantum Leap upgrade.

Alongside him is Cem Dagdelen, co-founder of Giza, a company seeking to bridge artificial intelligence (AI) and ZK tech. Together they take a trip back to the old days and explain how ZK-supercharged smart contracts can combine with other emerging technologies, such as AI. The episode is co-hosted by Nathan Jeffay from StarkWare.

The first three episodes of the series included discussions around the scalability of the Ethereum network to run the world’s financial system, the pain points of blockchain technology and how blockchain tech has impacted various sectors worldwide. In the first episode, Ben-Sasson and StarkWare CEO Uri Kolodny explore the future of Ethereum and why they believe in the success of blockchain technology.

The second and third episodes feature Avihu Levy from StarkWare and Motty Lavie of Braavos Wallet, as well as David Lavecky from Canvas, and StarkWare’s Louis Guthmann, who discussed the aches and pains that blockchain technology aims to resolve in the near future.

Zero Barriers is created in collaboration with StarkWare. Listen to the Zero Barriers series on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice.

Cointelegraph does not endorse the content of this article nor any product mentioned herein. Readers should do their own research before taking any action related to any product or company mentioned and carry full responsibility for their decisions.

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