Original editor: Biteye core contributor Crush
Original editor: Biteye core contributor Crush
The wealth effect of the Arbitrum airdrop has ignited the market's confidence in L2, and they have deployed L2 that has not yet been issued. And StarkWare, which has a high valuation of US$8 billion, is naturally attracting attention.
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01 STARKs, StarkEx, StarkNet
1.1 STARKs
STARKs（Scalable,Transparent ARgument of Knowledge) is a proof system that can prove and verify calculations, and aims to improve the scalability of Ethereum.
It allows large computations to be moved from on-chain to off-chain to reduce costs, generate proofs of the correctness of the computations, and then perform small computations on-chain to verify the proofs. That is, the verifier can judge the integrity of the calculation completed off the chain by performing very few operations on the chain.
L2 uses STARKs technology to package multiple transactions together for thousands of calculations, and then uses a single STARK proof to verify their validity on the chain.
All transactions in this batch share the cost of on-chain processing, thereby reducing Gas costs and improving user experience while inheriting the security of Ethereum. This model is similar to sharing the fare among users of shared taxis.
SNARKs (Succinct, Non-Interactive, Argument, Knowledge) are a concise non-interactive proof. Both STARKs and SNARKs are solutions to ZK Rollups.
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(Source: SUSS NiFT, ChatGPT)
Compared with SNARKs, STARKs have the following three advantages:
1. Distrust
STARKs are publicly verifiable and random to replace the trusted settings of SNARKs, reducing dependence on participants and improving protocol security.
2. Stronger scalability
STARK has the logarithmic compression characteristic of verification. Even if the complexity of the underlying calculation increases exponentially, STARKs still maintains a low proof and verification time, rather than linear growth like SNARKs.
3. Higher security assurance
STARKs are encrypted using a collision-resistant hash value, which is resistant to quantum computing attacks.
However, the proof size of STARKs is larger than that of SNARKs, so when the L2 transaction volume is low, it will be difficult to share the proof cost, resulting in a large confirmation delay. But when it proves that the scale increases, the marginal cost of using STARKT will decrease, which is suitable for large-scale applications. In addition, compared with SNARKs, the current adoption rate of STARKs is insufficient, and the basic tools need to be improved.
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(Source: SUSS NiFT, ChatGPT)
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1.2 StarkEx
StarkEx is a permissioned, application-specific custom scaling solution framework. Projects can use StarkEx to perform low-cost off-chain calculations and generate STARK proofs to prove execution correctness.
Such a proof contains 12,000 – 500,000 transactions. Finally, the proof is sent to the STARK validator on the chain, and the status update is accepted after the verification is correct.
StarkEx provides 3 data storage methods. In the ZK-Rollup mode, data is stored on the chain, which makes the data decentralized and easy for users to track and supervise.
However, the cost of publishing data on the chain is high. In the Validium mode, data is stored off-chain, which is low-cost and does not expose the data publicly.
But a Data Availability Committee is needed to oversee whether the data is handled properly. Volition is a hybrid data availability model where users can choose whether to put data on-chain or off-chain.
Applications deployed on StarkEx include perpetual options dYdX, NFT L2 Immutable, sports digital card trading marketplace Sorare, and multi-chain DeFi aggregator rhino.fi.
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1.3 StarkNet
StarkNet is a permissionless L2 where anyone can deploy smart contracts developed in the Cairo language. Contracts deployed on StarkNet can interact with each other to build new composable protocols.
Unlike StarkEx where applications are responsible for submitting transactions, StarkNet's orderer batches transactions and sends them for processing and proof.
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1.4 Cairo
Cairo is a programming language used for STARK to prove general computing customization, which makes developing, reviewing, and maintaining code simpler and faster without being restricted by EVM. It can abandon the historical burden of Ethereum to do more complex calculations such as account abstraction, and in game development It is also more flexible and supports games on the entire chain.
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1.5 SHARP (shared prover) shared prover
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02 StarkNet Economic Model
StarkWare has minted 10 billion StarkNet tokens off-chain. However, these tokens do not represent equity in StarkWare, nor do they provide any right to participate in StarkWare or confer any right to claim against StarkWare.
StarkNet tokens can be used as native tokens to pay Gas fees. Compared with other L2s that use ETH to pay Gas fees, StarkNet tokens can better capture ecological value and reduce the impact of ETH, an exogenous token.
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(Source: StarkWare.https://medium.com/starkware/part-3-starknet-token-design-5cc17af066c6 )
StarkNet clearly rewards developers and past StarkEx users, but it is not clear whether StarkNet users have airdrops. 8.1% of the tokens in the initial token distribution are unspent, in a manner determined by the community.
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03 StarkWare Financing
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(Sources: Crunchbase, SUSS NiFT)
In July 2022, Alameda Research will invest an additional $9.5 million. However, Alameda Research has gone bankrupt in November 2022, and whether this investment has been received is doubtful.
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Eli Ben-Sasson
Eli is the Co-Founder and President of StarkWare and Chairman of its Board of Directors.
Since receiving his PhD in Theoretical Computer Science from the Hebrew University in 2001, he has been working on cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs of computational integrity.
Eli is a co-inventor of the STARK, FRI, and Zerocash protocols, and a founding scientist of the Zcash Company. Over the years, he held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Uri Kolodny
Uri is the co-founder and CEO of StarkWare and a member of its board of directors.
He holds a BS in Computer Science (cum laude) from Hebrew University and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Uri is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded several tech companies including Mondria, which develops tools for big data visualization.
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05 Competitors
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(Source: SUSS NiFT)
Data source: (2023.4.21)
1. https://dune.com/gm 365/L2
2. https://www.coingecko.com/
3. https://defillama.com/
Optimism and Arbitrum adopt optimistic rollup, which is less difficult to develop, and already has a relatively complete ecosystem, attracting a lot of funds and users, and even out of excellent L2 native protocols such as GMX and Gains Protocol.
Vitalik said during ETHSeoul that although Optimistic Rollups are more developed, the foundation of ZK Rollups technology will enable it to eventually replace Optimistic Rollups. While ZK Rollups are faster, they lack the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which makes running dApps difficult. Because EVM is the main processing unit of dApps. So ZK-based Rollups is developing an EVM-compatible solution. If the development process is slow, ZK Rollups may lose the first-mover advantage, leaving Optimistic Rollups firmly on the throne. This is similar to the competition between Ethereum and other L1s. Although the performance of Ethereum is not the best, it firmly absorbs the most funds and the best developers by virtue of its first-mover advantage.
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(Source: Messari, SUSS NiFT)
Type-1 is ETH equivalent, 100% seamless use of EVM infrastructure, but the proof process is slow. Taiko mitigates this shortcoming by quickly confirming finality before zero-knowledge proofs are generated.
The specific way is to just prove that the past state X is valid, and there is no transaction from account A after X, so the user can withdraw his tokens in state X. At present, the decentralized proof and protocol economics have been tested in alpha-2, in which there are 126 independent provers, 93,146 blocks have been proved, and the proof time is between 130 and 160 seconds.
Taiko has deprecated alpha-2 for now and will launch alpha-3 in Q2. Due to the uncompromising complexity of Type-1 zkEVM in achieving equivalence, there may not be a mainnet this year.
Type-2 EVM equivalent, demonstrating speed improvement over Type-1, but still slow. Type 2 is Scroll, the goal of Linea, Polygon zkEVM has been achieved.
The Beta version of the Polygon zkEVM mainnet was launched on March 27 as scheduled. During the first phase of Mainnet Beta, a dedicated security committee will be able to quickly upgrade the Polygon zkEVM. In the second phase, there will be a series of measures to ensure that users are protected should anything go wrong, but with a higher degree of decentralization and without a security committee with privileged access.
Gas Fee is paid in ETH. It is expected that the pledge and governance in Polygon zkEVM will use MATIC tokens in the future. In addition, Polygon zkEVM supports account abstraction through ERC-4337, which will allow users to use any token to pay fees.
Scroll and the Ethereum Foundation have jointly developed zkEVM as an open source, which will shorten the proof time by outsourcing parallel computing and proof to miners. Scroll is in the Alpha testnet stage, and it can perform cross-chain and transfer. It has been running without any obstacles for two months, and it is expected to launch the mainnet in the second quarter.
On March 28, ConsenSys announced the rebranding of ConsenSys zkEVM as Linea, which is currently open for testing to any developer, user, or protocol. Linea combines zero-knowledge proofs with EVM equivalence through native integrations such as MetaMask and Truffle, providing developers with flexibility and scalability without requiring ZK technology expertise.
Linea employs a multi-certifier system where multi-signatures can enforce specific outcomes when there are vulnerabilities in the code. With this system, a rollup will utilize several attestation mechanisms with different levels of security to eliminate the single point of failure risk that exists with a single attestor rollup.
Type-3 is almost EVM equivalent, faster to prove, but some apps need to be redeveloped. Type 3 is the transition phase Scroll is currently in. Kakarot is a zkEVM written in Cairo. As an interpreter for EVM bytecode, it may eventually become L3 on StarkNet and is currently classified as Type-3.
Type-4,Compile the smart contract source code written in a high-level language such as Solidity into a ZK-SNARK friendly language. Turns out to be fast, but not very compatible.
zkSync Era is live and open to general users. At present, there are not many users who share the zkSync gas fee, so the interaction cost is relatively high, and some project parties have subsidized the gas fee. Due to the wealth effect of the Arbitrum airdrop, community user interaction is enthusiastic, but currently there are mostly Tugou projects on zkSync, and many rug pull incidents have occurred.
StarkNet uses Warp as the Solidity to Cairo compiler. StarkNet is currently the only zkEVM that decentralizes its orderer and prover. However, StarkNet has not yet released a production-level version, which is only suitable for users to experience small amounts of interaction, and tasks often fail to execute.
Vitalik also proposed a hybrid mode of Optimistic and ZK. Before zkEVM matures, release the blockchain and wait for 24 hours. If there is no fraud challenge, issue a zero-knowledge proof to confirm the block. Introduce governance if challenged, adjudicated via 2 of 3 model.
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06 Summary
StarkNet adopts the STARK-based Rollup route. Although this solution has obvious advantages over other solutions in terms of decentralization, trustlessness, and anti-censorship, it is also very difficult to develop due to the immature development tools of this solution. Performance still needs to be improved.
In addition, while StarkNet has received support from institutional investors, it is still in the trial stage and has not yet fully matured. The focus of the next stage of StarkNet is to upgrade the sequencer, which is currently developed by Python, to be developed by Rust to improve the performance of the blockchain.
In addition, it is to improve the richness and maturity of projects in the ecology. Encryption-native users can experience projects in the ecosystem, but they need to pay attention to the risks of the project, and need to conduct a sufficient risk assessment before choosing to participate.
While StarkNet is quantum-resistant, it remains to be seen whether it will be the endgame for scaling. Therefore, we need to continue to pay attention to and evaluate the future development of StarkNet.
The security of the blockchain is the top priority of the entire ecosystem. The security of the underlying base layer must not be ignored, compromised, compromised, or compromised, otherwise the entire ecosystem and ledger will lose the trust of users.
Therefore, in the design of the base layer, it is necessary to choose the most secure consensus algorithm, even though its energy consumption may be high. This problem can be solved by adopting renewable energy mining like the one pioneered by Nasdaq-listed Irish Energy Limited.
In contrast, the second layer can be more centralized for greater efficiency and flexibility. Whether it is the bottom layer or the upper layer, it is necessary to follow reasonable design principles to ensure the safety and reliability of the entire ecosystem.
Any second layer or application that relies on the security of the Ethereum base layer must have full confidence in the consensus algorithm of the base layer to ensure that its security is not compromised. This may be the greatest systemic risk facing the community.
Disclaimer:
This article uses ChatGPT for content enhancement. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model that is trained based on advanced techniques and can generate human understandable language. The above StarkNet analysis content is only for readers' understanding and academic research, and does not constitute any investment advice.
No one should use this as the only reference for investment decisions, nor should they conduct any trading operations based on it. The information contained in this article is not guaranteed to be accurate, complete, timeliness or applicability, and readers should make their own assessment and bear the risks arising therefrom.
Neither the author, the publisher nor any related parties shall be liable for any loss or damage arising from the conclusions or decisions made by readers based on this article. Readers should consult professional advisors or make decisions based on their own independent judgment before making any investment.
