Ethereum () layer-2 scaling firm Starkware is revealing its plans to open source one of its software products.
The blockchain company its Starknet Prover, which powers its scalability engine, will be made open source to boost accessibility to developers and promote collaboration.
“Open-sourced STARK software will allow the community to maintain and develop the network independently, and therefore provides the most genuine path to build Starknet as a decentralized public good. It will also allow the community to have more freedom in contributing to the development of the prover, and therefore of Starknet. In addition, open sourcing the Starknet Prover will allow more eyes to review the code, improve its quality, help detect bugs and provide transparency.”
Starknet is a decentralized validity rollup, otherwise known as a zero-knowledge (ZK) roll-up.
Rollups are solutions that execute transactions outside of Ethereum’s blockchain but record the transactional data. The two types of rollups are optimistic rollups and ZK rollups. Optimistic rollups automatically assume transactions are valid, while ZK rollups run computations off the chain and then submit a validity report.
The Starknet Prover will be built on codebase that is based on a prover that has been operating since June 2020 and processed 327 million transactions, minted 95 million non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and settled roughly $824 billion in value.
