StarkNet, one of the Four Kings of Layer 2, has made a new big move.
At the just-concluded EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference) conference in Paris, one of the hot spots that attracted much attention was that StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson said that Starknet will soon launch the Starknet application chain (Appchain) and announced the launch of a Starknet contract for development The extremely fast toolkit for Starknet Foundry.
Starknet is a permissionless decentralized Layer 2 protocol based on ZK-Rollup technology developed by StarkWare, which can help dApps use STARK proof to achieve greater computing scale with lower transaction costs. The network allows smart contracts to interact with other contracts deployed on the blockchain, thereby increasing composability between protocols.
What is the application chain? In fact, Cosmos and Polkadot proposed and promoted this concept as early as 2016, and the newly launched Starknet Application has once again attracted widespread attention in the industry due to its technical advantages and new features such as customizability and decentralization.
For developers, the release of the open source project Starknet Foundry and the Cairo writing language ecosystem will also bring an easy-to-learn and more efficient development experience.
Starknet application chain and its technical advantages
Simply put, Starknet Appchain is an application blockchain specifically designed to meet the needs of a specific application. The main advantages include customizability, high throughput and decentralization, and the ability to implement new features not yet available on the Starknet public chain. The first Starknet Appchain will also reportedly launch a closed beta on mainnet soon.
This move by Starknet is in line with the development trend of Layer 2 modular networks. Ecosystems such as Optimism, Polygon, zkSync and Arbitrum all have their own application chains. Although the underlying architecture is different, they all reflect the general advantages of application chains: no congestion on the public chain, and more free features.
Customizability
Starknet Appchain serves as a customization environment in which applications can customize Starknet instances. Developers can leverage the ecosystems native development tool, Starknet Stack, to better control parameters, reduce costs, expand scale and selective privacy, and customize their own applications. related settings.
The goal of Starknet is to enable any application to deploy its own Starknet application chain in a permissionless manner. As the most scalable Rollup, Starknet has various options to provide configuration of various parameters, including consensus, blockchain parameters, and data availability. These application-specific blockchains can meet the unique requirements of individual applications in the Starknet ecosystem and also allow fine-tuning of the platform.
Compared with other ecological application chains, the real trick of Starknet is the STARK proof system - blockchain projects on Starknet can benefit from using the STARK proof system to enhance their security. Compared with other ZK proof systems, STARK proofs are more secure and more scalable - its proof generation speed is linearly scalable, and verification time and proof size are logarithmically scalable. That is, the larger the proof, the shorter the total cost and verification time. Additionally, the STARK proof relies entirely on hashing and information theory, so it has simpler cryptographic assumptions, making it resistant to certain attacks. But its disadvantage is that the scale of initial proof generation is large.
high throughput
The release also mentioned that after on-chain applications launch customized Starknet application chains, projects do not need to be congested on the public Starknet and can provide users with higher throughput and better user experience.
Compared to Ethereum, Starknet itself only requires a sequencer to perform computations off-chain. In order to reduce the amount of data, the prover generates ZK-STARK proofs for transactions. Finally, the verifier verifies the correctness of the proof on-chain, and finally bundles multiple Layer 2 transactions into a single transaction on Ethereum (called a rollup). Therefore, Starknet reduces the execution and storage costs on the chain, resulting in lower gas fees and higher throughput.
decentralized
StarkNet, which attaches great importance to decentralization, also makes its Appchain decentralized. The Starknet technology stack allows any application to deploy its own Starknet Appchain in a permissionless manner, and allows developers to leverage Starknet Stack technology to build customized Starknet instances for applications.
Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, said that the decentralized stack makes the network more secure, resilient, transparent, scalable and innovative. And there are no single points of failure, no reliance on a single entity, no black boxes and no more builders.
new function
In his speech, Eli Ben-Sasson also mentioned that Appchain is customized and can freely implement functions not yet supported on the Starknet public chain, including creating its own fee market logic, consensus mechanism, etc.
Starknet Appchain was originally proposed as a Layer 2 solution on Ethereum, but as early as 2021, StarkWare introduced the concept of a Layer 3 solution. In order to achieve greater scalability and lower transaction fees, Starknet officials stated that Appchain will migrate to a Layer 3 solution in the future and will also run on the Layer 2 public Starknet network.
These new features and experiences implemented in the Starknet application chain will have an impact on other application chains or public networks.
Noteworthy Development Use Cases
Madara Sequencer
One of the latest use cases in Starknet Stacks decentralized graph is the birth of the high-performance sequencer Madara Sequencer.
Starknet officially stated that Madara has enhanced the functions of Cairo VM by using the Substrate framework to generate provable, secure and flexible programs, which will provide Starknet with the ability to create customizable and efficient application chains. Additionally, Madara will improve Starknet’s interoperability and on-chain privacy levels.
Madara is based on the Substrate framework and enhances the functionality of Cairo VM through a decentralized consensus mechanism to generate provable, secure and flexible programs, which are welcomed by developers.
Starknet official data shows that the community development work started in February 2023 and involves a community of 45 developers who have been working together to improve Madara and have generated more than 740 submissions and more than 400 merge PRs to date. .
Dojo
In addition to core components, Dojo is also one of the important ecological components for running Starknet applications.
Dojo is a game application development framework in Starknet and the first verifiable on-chain game engine.
Generally speaking, due to scale and cost limitations, most on-chain games are limited to the tokenization of in-game assets. Expensive and slow are also problems that are always difficult to solve. However, as Starknet gradually realizes cheaper and faster transactions in the game, Starknet not only allows users to own in-game assets, but also makes the infinite non-operability of on-chain games a reality. Therefore, many game projects began to be technically built on Starknet.
At the same time, the on-chain game engine Dojo appears as a stage for game development. Through the application technology on the StarkNet platform, developers are allowed to build games on the chain without writing custom code for basic physics, logic and game mechanics, making the game Beautiful scenes, fast player movement and realistic character behavior become more realistic possibilities.
The growth of technology has allowed more games to be developed. Starknet attaches great importance to the incubation of native applications. Its development team StarkWare has held multiple rounds of hackathons with partners such as MatchBox, Only Dust, Nethermind, and Mask Network, promoting the development of a large number of on-chain game teams. Therefore, the number of Dojo-powered games on Starknet is gradually increasing, including Dope Wars, Influence, Realms, and CafeCosmos.
Impact on developers
What impact will the emergence of Starknet Appchain have on the developer community?
On the one hand, as mentioned above, developers can take advantage of the performance of the Starknet Stack and the customization advantages of the application chain to improve the throughput of projects on the chain and customize the user experience. On the other hand, on EthCC, Starknet Foundry, an extremely fast toolkit for developing Starknet contracts, was released; the writing advantages of the Cairo language of the Starknet technology stack will also attract more developers.
Starknet Foundry
In addition to Appchain, another new move of StarkNet that attracted much attention at this EthCC is the release of the open source project Starknet Foundry.
This extremely fast toolkit for developing Starknet contracts was designed and developed by the ex-Protostar team at Software Mansion, also written in Rust based on the native Cairo test runner and Blockifie.
cairo language
In terms of programming languages, the Starknet technology stack is supported by the Cairo language - Starknet contracts and the Starknet operating system are written using Cairo, which supports the deployment of almost all business logic. What is the experience of mature developers with the Starknet ecosystem and Cairo language?
As a person who has never written any Rust, Moody Salem, Uniswaps chief Solidity developer, said that he started to learn Cairo in a few weeks, and now the efficiency of writing Cairo contracts is comparable to that of Solidity. Itamar Lesuisse, co-founder and CEO of Argent, feels that the Starknet ecosystem feels like the early Ethereum, attracting the best talents in this field with its decentralized development and innovation methods.
The latest version of Cairo, V2, is a new Rust-like language that exists today. Because it complies with developers writing habits, it is easy to learn and convenient to write, so it has changed from a niche low-level language to a developer-friendly high-level language.
At the same time, Cairo, as a general-purpose smart contract language, has the additional advantage that the ZK-friendly Cairo language has very high compilation efficiency, and developers can also generate zero-knowledge proofs for their Cairo codes, which will further reduce Gas fees. In particular, due to the network effect of the STARK proof system, its transaction costs will decrease marginally as the transaction volume increases.
Therefore, many applications can find developers in the Starknet ecosystem to cooperate, hire or outsource, and those on-chain game projects that require huge adoption are more suitable for Starknet deployment.
Conclusion
The release of Starknet Appchain marks an important progress of Starknet. Since then, in the competition of technology stack, the four kings of Layer 2, Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync and Starknet, have their own application chain layouts.
Even so, Lisk still has certain problems, including limited composability and atomicity, lack of liquidity, additional resource and management consumption, limited ecosystem tools, etc. However, the growth of application chains reflects the common needs of developers, which is to provide users with a better experience through vertical integration.
Next, which specific application service needs can really be implemented on the application chain, which will be more perfect in terms of compatibility, efficiency, privacy, etc., and promote the faster development of application chain technology, so as to build a larger Web3 ecosystem, which deserves our attention and cooperation. expect.
