StarkWare was founded in 2018 by scientists at the forefront of zero-knowledge computation research. As the name suggests, StarkWare’s ZK technology is built upon zk-STARKs — co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson and Michael Riabzev are the co-inventors of the STARK protocol. StarkWare’s products use a Turing complete platform and programming language for producing STARK proofs called Cairo.
StarkWare’s validium solution, StarkEx, is one of the first zero-knowledge scaling solutions that found strong product-market fit with a wide range of protocols. Both DeFi and NFT dApps have leveraged StarkEx’s scaling solution to offer a better user experience. As of this writing, StarkEx has $1.2 billion in total value locked (TVL) and has processed 65 million transactions since June 2020.
Applications Built on StarkEx
https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*h0MPlihKTCotYkyC
The StarkWare team is also developing a general-purpose ZK rollup called StarkNet. Its Alpha version launched on mainnet this November. It features EVM compatibility via a Solidity-to-Cairo compiler. Only whitelisted applications will be launched during the Alpha phase as the team expects to change, fix, and improve the platform. The sequencer (what executes the transactions) is also currently centralized and closed-source. However, the team plans to gradually remove the whitelist guardrails, grow the ecosystem, and open-source and decentralize the platform over time. The team terms this the “planets — constellations — universe” roadmap.
Starkware’s Roadmap to a Robust, Decentralized Ecosystem
https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*-tZTkRXoLhL0yGPq
Source: Starkware
StarkNet’s ecosystem is still relatively bare given the recent Alpha launch and the requirement to learn a new programming language. However, we expect more projects to come on board. Starkware’s team has worked closely with Nethermind to release Warp, a transpiler that converts and deploys Solidity-written smart contracts onto StarkNet. The Nethermind team plans to Warp Uniswap V3 onto StarkNet, which should pave the way for other existing projects to port their code to StarkNet and catalyze a step-change in growth for the platform.
Select StarkNet Projects
https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*8OHPlVz02UOUgNc8
StarkWare also pioneered a “Volition” architecture, in which users can decide whether to use validium or rollup on the L2 on a per transaction basis. Some scenarios for the Volition architecture could include:
Volition provides the best of both worlds — users can choose the level of security guarantees that they would like while enjoying low transaction fees.