StarkWare to Open Source Its “Magic Wand” Scaling Solution for Ethereum

StarkWare to Open Source Its Magic Wand Scaling Solution for Ethereum

Israeli-based StarkWare, the company behind popular Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions StarkEx and StarkNet, announced plans today to open-source its STARK Prover software.

To date, the technology has processed around 327 million transactions and minted over 90 millions NFTs. STARK Prover serves as a vital component for StarkWare in the Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups process, bundling hundreds of thousands of transactions into a compact cryptographic proof recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.

“We think of the Prover as the magic wand of Stark technology. It wondrously generates the proofs that allow unimaginable scaling,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of StarkWare during a Sunday event in Tel Aviv. “This is a landmark moment for scaling Ethereum, and in a wider sense for cryptography,”

The STARK Prover will be renamed to the StarkNet Prover and licensed under Apache 2.0, providing Web3 developers the freedom to copy, modify and commercially distribute the source code without incurring any royalties.

The codebase for the Starknet Prover is built on software that has been in operation since June 2020, providing support for well-known StarkEx-based decentralized applications such as Immutable X, Sorare, and dYdX, among others.

“The quicker and more broadly they [devs] build, the faster we’ll see mass onboarding to solutions that truly enable people to manage their own funds. So there’s a direct line between open-sourcing key tech and popularizing self-custody,” added Ben-Sasson.

The company had earlier faced criticism from the cryptocurrency community and rival solutions like ZK Sync and Polygon for retaining the intellectual property of its technology, which goes against the open-source and interoperable principles of blockchain.

StarkWare has already made its programming language and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) alternative, Cairo 1.0, open-source, as well as the Papyrus Full node. The company is also in the process of open-sourcing its new sequencer.

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Author

Himan Mohapatra
Himan Mohapatra
Himan Mohapatra is an industry expert within the crypto-sphere and the primary journalist for Coinmash. He is an expert in finance and disruptive tech, such as blockchain.