Starknet, a generalized zk starks based scalability solution for the ethereum network, has launched its alpha on mainnet this Monday.
“StarkNet Alpha enables general computation smart contracts that support composability, both with other StarkNet contracts and via L1<>L2 messaging with L1 contracts,” the project said.
With this being the very first version, it is an actual alpha and to underscore that problems should be expected, they say it’s not even audited yet:
“Expect changes, fixes, and improvements to come. StarkNet Alpha has yet to be audited, and we may delay such an audit till the network matures some more.”
It’s a very bare skeleton currently where end users are concerned, so we can’t try anything yet, but developers are already launching contracts.
Deversifi for example plans to launch in the coming weeks a Starknet portal which looks pretty cool:
Argent is launching a wallet. “Proud to be supporting StarkWare Ltd. by building the first StarkNet wallet,” they said.
Of the rest, isn’t known. This uses a Cairo programming language, but there’s a wrapper that can turn Solidity into Cairo. That wrapper is currently unstable according to its developers, Nethermind, but they’re launching a stable release “in the coming weeks.”
We tried to allocate their deposit contract, but the most we could get was the proxy contract which is attracting some usage.
There will be no fees to begin with, but a new upgrade will launch in a few weeks that will implement fees.
The rollout is intentionally slow to prevent any bugs causing too much damage, with Starknet to whitelist projects so they can be sure the devs know what they’re doing.
There’s only one sequencer to begin with. The sequencer “decides what sequence of transactions will be included in the next block.
The Sequencer sends the block to a Prover, which computes a proof and submits it to the L1 Verifier contract. Once the Verifier verifies a block’s proof, it stores on-chain the associated Fact – the result of the off-chain computation.
This Fact, which attests to the validity of the block, can later be queried by anyone. After the Fact is registered on L1, a State-Update L1 transaction is called to update the global state of StarkNet according to the newly generated – now also STARK-proven and verified – L2 block of transactions.”
From a preliminary view, it looks like a lot of this zk stark technology will be on the background. Users might not even know they’re on starks unless they’re told so.
The wallet however will probably have a starks button, and the dapps will likewise have a stark button to click. Those familiar with defi will know because initially there are no fees and thereafter we don’t know what the fees will be, but hopefully in cents.
Dapps might even have an incentive to hide the on-chain fee completely and cover it from whatever dapp fees they have. dYdX for example takes a certain percentage for every buy and sell like all exchanges. An on-chain fee of ten cent per transaction or even a dollar can easily be covered from that.
Same for Uniswap and many other dapps as well as for things like Opensea. Network fees thus might be seen by users only when they do a plain transaction once this develops, but those are cheap even on the base layer at a fiver or so.
All of it meaning there may be reason to think that it might be the case we will be able to, soon enough, party on defi and mint our nfts like it’s 2019 2016, forever.
No one is "embracing" high per-transaction fees. There's certainly happiness about *total* fees being high, but that's not the same as being ok with per-transaction fees being high.
(And how do you have high total fees but low per-tx fees? By increasing capacity!)
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 24, 2020
IsItAppnin???
There have been whole “wars” over it and we have waited so long, that it is difficult to believe either stark or zksync or both will really give us unlimited scaling while maintaining L1 security as Starkware claims.
And yet we’re just weeks from finding out with devs that are launching these contracts and have previously been working on these testnets, probably already knowing.
So it is possible, it is indeed maybe the case, it’s, well inconceivable but, yeah we don’t dare being excited yet. But it looks like maybe, perhaps, it could really be.
“ZK rollups can layer. Infinite global scaling. It’s turtles all the way down,” says Starkwhale, giving us the featured image.
Five years of the brightest minds in this space focusing on this, even a whole new zk mindboglin technology, and now they dare tell us it is time to reap the fruits? That we can layer $100 into ten defi tokens for a fee of 10 cent that we don’t even have to directly pay? That ethereum can handle one billion transactions a day with zk tech at the full capacity of potentially 1,000x?
Yeah we’ve seen written that movie before. The script has changed so often and the prize is so big that we refuse to take any other stance but disbelief until we get to factually report otherwise what is, not weeks and not maybies.
But, broadband is clearly coming, and some say it’s even here. Christmas is coming too, aptly, so as to symbolize a new dawn as this space moves towards its final form at the protocol layer with mainstream global capacity for the poor and the rich, for the jpegs and everything.
