Starknet 0.12.0 Officially Deploys the Mainnet: Realizing the Quantum Leap

Preface

It is reported that Starknet 0.12.0 has been officially deployed on the mainnet on July 12, achieving greater throughput and lower latency. Before reading this article, you need to have a preliminary understanding of the concept of zero-knowledge proof:

Zero-knowledge proof belongs to the concept of cryptography and is an interactive proof. Let’s start with a classic example: A is red-green colorblind, and B has two billiard balls, one red and one green. In the eyes of A, the two balls have exactly the same color, and B needs to prove to A that one of the two billiard balls is red and the other is green. At this time, A puts the billiard balls behind his back, he can switch the two balls or not, and B needs to judge whether A has switched the two balls, repeating it many times, if the result of B’s guess every time is Correct, then A thinks that one of the two billiard balls is red and the other is green, which is the real situation. This is an example of a classic zero-knowledge proof. In zero-knowledge proof, we only need two identities of “prover” and “verifier”.

1 Introduction to Starknet

StarkNet is a permissionless decentralized Validity-Rollup (also known as “ZK-Rollup”). As a Layer 2 on Ethereum, it enables any Dapp to achieve infinite expansion in computing without sacrificing the composability and security of Ethereum.

StarkWare, the parent company of StarekNet, was established in 2018 and is headquartered in Israel. Its main products are Starknet and StarkEx. Its company valuation has reached 8 billion US dollars. So far, StarkNet has gone through five rounds of financing, raising a total of 273 million US dollars.

It is worth mentioning that the Ethereum Foundation has specifically publicly supported starkware utilizing starks, and they have provided a $12 million grant to starkware. And this is one of the reasons why the industry is generally optimistic about the future development of StarkNet and its orthodoxy.

Token Economic Model

StarkNet announced on November 16, 2022 that its native token $STRK will be deployed on the Ethereum mainnet for voting, staking, and fee payment.

Figure 1-1 $STARK Token Economic Model

In the token economic model, except for 49.9% tokens of investors and core contributors, the remaining 50.1% tokens are all owned by the StarkNet Foundation. Of this, 8.1% of tokens remain unallocated. This part will be used by the community to determine the corresponding use, so this part of tokens is generally speculated as a potential airdrop quota. The Starknet Foundation has also appointed former Facebook executive Diego Oliva as its first CEO. Oliva has previously stated that he will focus on the governance of the Starknet decentralized community, emphasizing the rights and interests of developers and users.

route map

V 0.12.0 throughput and latency

The official recently announced the overall roadmap for 2023. Version 0.12.0 was officially deployed on the mainnet on Wednesday, July 12. The latest version of Starknet, 0.12.0, introduces significant performance improvements, including improvements in throughput and latency. By adopting the Rust-based Sequencer and Rust-Cairo VM, the performance of StarkNet will be significantly improved, and the OKEX exchange has begun to support the deposit of the ETH starknet mainnet.

V 0.13.0 Transaction Cost

In version V 0.13.0, the transaction cost of Starknet will be greatly reduced. This is achieved through volition, a major component of reducing transaction costs. L1 (Ethereum) data costs account for 95% of transaction costs today, and Volition will allow developers to build Starknet applications using a hybrid Data Availability (DA) model. Additionally, Ethereum’s EIP-4844 (Sharded Blob Transactions) is expected to be released in Q4 2023. Due to Ethereum’s EIP-4844 and Starknet’s Volition (off-chain data availability), Starknet’s data costs will be significantly reduced.

V 0.14.0 Fee Marketplace

Network congestion is a headache for every developer and user. To solve this problem, Starknet will introduce a fee market in V 0.14.0 to efficiently allocate Starknet’s limited resources according to how much gas users pay for transactions.

V 0.15.0 shorter fixed block interval

In the V0.15.0 version, some improvement plans aim to improve the performance and user experience of Starknet, by decoupling the relationship between blocks and proofs, reducing the block interval and improving the throughput of the network. This will make Starknet a more powerful and efficient blockchain platform.

2 Technical Analysis

ZK-Rollup VS OP-Rollup

Currently the most widely used Layer 2 on the market - the underlying technology of Arbitrium is OP-Rollup, (Optimistic Rollup). It achieves expansion through Fraud proofs. In Op-Rollup, the transaction data is optimistically believed to be correct by the system, without real-time verification, directly entering a waiting period. During the waiting period, if a node raises an objection and provides evidence to prove that there is a malicious transaction, the transaction will be cancelled; if there is no objection, the transaction will be automatically completed and verified on the main chain after the waiting period is over.

Starknet is Layer 2 based on ZK-Rollup technology. ZK-Rollup mainly relies on zero-knowledge proof technology. By separating the calculation and verification processes, the verification of contract execution is completed off-chain, and then the verification results are submitted to the Ethereum mainnet. The calculation process is performed off-chain, and the verification result is only submitted to Ethereum as a proof. Therefore, this method provides the highest level of security and user privacy protection.

Compared with OP-rollup and ZK-rollup, ZK-rollup is a safer alternative than OP-rollup, while OP-rollup is a better choice for DeFi projects with EVM compatibility. It can be seen that ZK-rollup with EVM compatibility will be the future narrative development direction of Layer 2 with its natural security advantages. Security is achieved thanks to StarkNet’s reliance on STARK, the most secure and scalable cryptographic proof system.

Zk-STARKs VS Zk-SNARKs

STARK (Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge) and Zk-SNARK (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) are both zero-knowledge proof technologies, which are used to create proofs that can be verified without revealing all information. But there are some key differences in their implementation and features.

Choosing to use SNARKs or STARKs depends on specific application scenarios and requirements. SNARKs have advantages in proof size and verification speed, but require a trust setup. STARKs do not require trust settings and are resistant to quantum computer attacks, but the proof is larger and the verification speed is slower.

A concept is introduced here - Trusted Setup, which is a process used in some types of zero-knowledge proof systems (such as zk-SNARKs), which creates some initial parameters before the system starts to operate. These parameters are used both during proof generation and verification.

The key to the trust setup is to ensure that the generators thoroughly destroy the secrets they use after creating the initial parameters. If the generator kept this secret, they would have the ability to create false proofs that appear to be valid, which would compromise the security of the system. Therefore, the trust setup process needs to be subject to rigorous scrutiny and monitoring to ensure that all generators have properly destroyed secret information. That’s why it’s called a “trust setup” because the user has to trust that the process is fair and the generator isn’t cheating.

However, zk-STARKs is a zero-knowledge proof system that does not require trust settings. This means that, unlike systems that require a trust setup (such as zk-SNARKs), the proof generation and verification process of zk-STARKs does not rely on any secret information. This provides greater transparency and security, as the security of the system does not depend on the actions of any particular individual or organization. zk-STARKs are realized by using a technology called “FRI” (Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs).

FRI agreement

The basic idea of the FRI protocol is to gradually reduce the degree of polynomials through a series of sampling and interpolation steps. At each step, the prover provides a new polynomial that it claims is a compressed version of the original polynomial. The verifier can verify that the claim is correct by checking the values of these polynomials at random points.

This process continues until the degree of the polynomial is low enough that the verifier can directly check all its coefficients. Since the degree of the polynomial is halved in each step, this process can be done in logarithmic time, which makes the FRI protocol very efficient.

A key property of the FRI protocol is that it only relies on public, pre-defined parameters and does not require any secret information. This makes it useful for building zero-knowledge proof systems such as zk-STARKs that do not require a trust setup. However, the FRI (Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs) protocol is not equivalent to a trust setup. Instead, the FRI protocol is a technology for generating and verifying proofs of zk-STARKs. It allows the prover to prove to the verifier that the coefficients of a polynomial are low-degree without revealing the specific content of the polynomial. The key property of the FRI protocol is that it only relies on public, pre-defined parameters and does not require any secret information. This makes it useful for building zero-knowledge proof systems such as zk-STARKs that do not require a trust setup. The FRI protocol is a key component of zk-STARKs, which enables zk-STARKs to work without requiring a trust setup. But the FRI protocol itself is not a trust setup process, as it does not involve the generation or destruction of any secret information.

How Starknet Works

StarkWare’s products include StarkEx, a ZKR enterprise service customized for project parties, and the more general StarkNet. StarkNet consists of five parts, namely: prover (certifier), Sequencer (sorter) and Full node (full node) on Starknet; and verifier (verifier) and Starknet core (core state) deployed on Ethereum contract).

Its working principle is to initiate a transaction on StarkNet, which is accepted, sorted, verified by the off-chain server sorter, and packaged into blocks, executes the transaction, and then forwards the status to the starknet core status contract. Immediately, the prover generates a proof of the transaction and sends it to the verifier of Ethereum for verification. The verifier sends the verification result to Ethereum’s starknet core state contract, and triggers a new set of Ethereum transactions from the Starknet core contract to update the global state on the chain for record keeping. The full node (Full node) plays a storage function, including state changes, metadata, proofs, and records all transactions executed in Starknet, and tracks the current global state of the system.

Figure 2-1 Schematic diagram of the working principle of Starknet

3 StarkNet Ecosystem

Figure 3-1 Starknet ecological map (from Twitter @odin_free)

There are many ecological projects in Starknet, currently including more than 100 dapps and services. Among them, there are two types of wallets, Braavos and Argent, but the mnemonics between the two are not interoperable. More than 60 Defi protocols have been deployed, including DEXs such as 10kswap, Jediswap, Myswap, and lending protocols such as Zklend; as of now, according to Defilama data, the total TVL of StarkNet is only $17.36M. Although the overall TVL is on the rise, the Compared with the $189.21M of zkSync Era of the same type, there is still a gap of nearly ten times. It can be seen that the StarkNet ecosystem is still in its early stage.

Figure 3-2 StarkNet TVL from defilama

The cross-chain bridge includes the official cross-chain bridge stargate, Orbiter, Layerswap, etc.; Did has StarknetID and the mission platform StarQuest. At present, the NFT Odyssey activities of Starknet’s various protocols are in full swing. Whether StarkNet’s future ecology will continue to prosper or be short-lived, we can only wait and see…