Building a Tower from Sand: StarkWare's 2023 Annual Technical Achievements and Review

Author: Starknet

Summary:

• Starknet lays the foundation for complex, high-computation, innovative applications such as DeFi platforms, on-chain games, and dynamic NFTs.
• Starknet continues to have the fastest-growing developer ecosystem among all L2s (and some L1s).
• StarkWare open-sourced key elements such as the Stone prover, Starknet sequencer, and Papyrus full node in 2023.

Highlights of StarkWare and the overall progress of the Starknet ecosystem in 2023.

• Decentralization and Community
• STARK Technology: Reaching New Heights
• Innovations on Ethereum
• Open Source Moment: Setting New Standards for Protocols
• Starknet Application Chains
• Community Engagement and Activities

Decentralization and Community Expansion

The Gaming Boom on Starknet

Creating successful on-chain games has been nearly impossible due to the limitations of L1 in terms of scale, user experience, and high costs. However, with the maturity of validity rollup technology, the promise of on-chain games has finally been realized.

As a result, the number of projects developing fully on-chain games on Starknet has surged over the past year, including the large multiplayer online game Influence set in a distant asteroid belt with an open economy for players, the user-programmable fighting game Shoshin, the fantasy strategy game Realms, and the survival strategy game Loot Survivor.

This year, we also witnessed the Starknet community launch a decentralized game engine Dojo, which simplifies the key elements needed for game building. Additionally, other components like ECS, Sozu, Torii, and Katana have also facilitated game development and deployment.

Starknet Decentralization Roadmap

2023 has been a significant year for the Starknet ecosystem in making important progress towards achieving the Starknet Decentralization Roadmap. This authoritative document, released in October 2023, outlines the values underpinning the creation of the ecosystem, the process of Starknet's transition to decentralization, the decentralized network architecture, and the planning for a fully open-source software stack.

Devonomics Pilot Program

The founding vision of Starknet holds that developers are crucial for achieving Ethereum's scalability while maintaining the core principles of decentralization, transparency, inclusivity, and security.

Therefore, the Starknet Foundation collaborated with StarkWare to launch the Devonomics Pilot Program in December 2023, aiming to realize the vision of decentralized governance. As the first of its kind in L2, the Devonomics Pilot Program will allocate over 1,600 ETH to Starknet dApps and core developers who contribute to the scaling and adoption of Starknet. This allocation employs an innovative mechanism to ensure fairness, inclusivity, and transparency in the distribution process.

The ultimate goal of Devonomics is to promote developer participation in Starknet's decision-making and future operations.

STARK Technology: Reaching New Heights

Leading the Trend

STARK technology continuously expands Ethereum's scalability and empowers applications to reach a broader audience and activities at a low cost. StarkEx's cumulative transaction volume has exceeded one trillion dollars, and in 2023, Starknet took only a few weeks to surpass the total activity of all other L2s on Ethereum.

Moreover, the developer ecosystem of Starknet grew by 14% in 2023, becoming the eighth largest cryptocurrency developer community, while also having the largest developer ecosystem among all L2s.

Quantum Leap

The release of Starknet Alpha v0.12.0 marks a quantum leap in providing higher performance and scalability, with throughput increased by ten times. This significant improvement is attributed to three key factors: the Cairo virtual machine in Rust (part of a year-long collaboration between LambdaClass and StarkWare), Blockifier, and Papyrus, all benefiting from the powerful capabilities of the Rust language.

Innovations on Ethereum

Herodotus Validates Ethereum

In a groundbreaking study of cryptographic proofs and block hashes, Herodotus collaborated with StarkWare to validate all Ethereum blocks since the genesis block. Prior to this, developers could access a trustless historical record limited to the past hour. However, by using Herodotus's storage proof solution and StarkWare's powerful SHARP (SHARed Prover) system, developers can now retrieve all Ethereum block hashes since the genesis block in a chain-native and verifiable manner.

In this way, we achieve the goal of EIP-2935 --- accessing historical block hashes beyond 256 blocks in a chain-native manner, unlocking new use cases in areas such as DeFi.

Open Source Moment --- Setting New Standards for Protocols

In alignment with Starknet's vision of decentralization, StarkWare has open-sourced several key components of its technology stack to empower developers. Here are some of the key elements that have been open-sourced:

Cairo

The upgrade from Cairo Zero to the (new) Cairo has made a significant impact at the start of 2023. Cairo is a Turing-complete programming language designed for efficiently writing provable programs, and the new version marks an important milestone in Cairo's development, making it more developer-friendly while enabling the writing of safer code with greater expressiveness.

Cairo also introduces a new intermediate representation, Sierra, ensuring that every program running on Cairo can be proven. This makes Cairo particularly suitable for use in permissionless networks like Starknet, providing strong DoS protection and censorship resistance. For more information about Cairo, click here.

Papyrus Full Node

As the Rust implementation of the Starknet full node, the launch of Papyrus lays the foundation for the new Starknet sequencer, significantly increasing Starknet's throughput. Papyrus is open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, aligning with StarkWare's ongoing strategy of open-sourcing the Starknet technology stack. Additionally, Papyrus joins other Starknet full nodes built by external teams in the ecosystem --- Pathfinder, Juno, and Deoxys.

Starknet Sequencer

Built on the foundation of Papyrus, the newly open-sourced Starknet sequencer is available under the Apache 2.0 license, designed and developed to enhance throughput and improve Starknet's performance. The sequencer is the crucial first stop for user transactions entering the STARK expansion process, sorting transactions and generating blocks, which are then converted into Ethereum proofs.

Stone Prover

StarkWare has open-sourced its battle-tested, powerful Stone (STARK one) prover under the Apache 2.0 license. In this way, StarkWare allows builders to utilize this proven powerful prover and build their own proof systems around it to achieve any goals they choose. This also attracts more people to participate in reviewing the code and providing optimizations, improving code quality, helping to detect bugs, and providing transparency.

Starknet Application Chains: A Home for Innovative dApps

Public networks offer composability and ecosystem advantages, but for certain applications, dedicated scaling solutions can provide specific benefits that public networks cannot achieve. Starknet application chains are making significant progress, with the first Starknet application chain already in production. Here are some milestones we witnessed in 2023:

Starknet Launches Its First Application Chain

In July 2023, Paradigm, the largest institutional liquidity network in the cryptocurrency space, launched Paradex, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange and the first application chain on Starknet. The launch of this product demonstrates Starknet's ability to meet the demands of applications requiring high computation, low costs, and customized specifications while maintaining self-custody capabilities.

The smart contracts behind this brand-new, testing-phase permanent trading platform were written by the Paradex team in just six months using Cairo.

Madara: A Project by the Exploration Team

Madara is a sequencer created by Starknet's exploration team and community members, changing the game for projects and developers interested in creating customized and efficient application chains.

By utilizing the Substrate framework, Madara enhances the capabilities of the Cairo virtual machine, enabling provable, secure, and flexible programs. Madara provides developers with special features, including support for potential on-chain privacy, simplified interoperability between different chains, and robust execution capabilities.

Madara paves the way for dApp development by providing cost-effective, scalable, and customizable solutions in the blockchain space, and many projects are already using Madara to enhance their applications with its scalable infrastructure, high throughput, and unprecedented control.

Starknet Technology Stack

One of the main goals of the Starknet ecosystem is to provide developers with decentralized, open-source tools that enable them to create scalable and secure projects. Starknet has the most decentralized Rollup technology stack, which includes many key infrastructures built by multiple independent teams.

Community Engagement and Activities

While developing projects aimed at benefiting existing community members, StarkWare continues to expand the Starknet community through multiple meetups, workshops, hackathons, and various events. Among the most notable events are the StarkWare Conference and the StarkWare Summit.

• StarkWare Conference --- Over the course of two days, StarkWare hosted more than 1,000 participants from around the world, the crypto ecosystem, and various industries. This event aimed to bring together the ever-growing StarkWare community for offline communication, collaboration, and learning activities. The event exceeded our expectations and became a bright beacon for the future of the Ethereum and Starknet developer communities. You can relive all the discussions and workshop highlights on our YouTube channel.
• Starknet Summit --- In August 2023, hundreds of participants flew to San Francisco, where they met face-to-face with the real faces behind the familiar Twitter handles and Discord IDs in the STARK ecosystem.

Future Vision

StarkWare's goal is to lead the development of the most innovative Ethereum scaling solutions.

It has been proven that STARK technology is the secret to facilitating excellent use case scaling and thriving, transforming Starknet into a hub of creative applications, including fully on-chain games, perpetual contracts, dynamic NFTs, and other complex logic applications.

In 2023, StarkWare supported the development of the Starknet ecosystem by providing tools for building blockchain applications with low-cost, unlimited scaling needs. While achieving these milestones, StarkWare has provided ample support to developers and other members of the ecosystem in pursuit of Starknet's decentralization goals.

Starknet has become the fastest-growing L2 in the industry (by developer count) by introducing innovative technologies and processes and open-sourcing key elements of its technology stack, and it continues to expand. Looking ahead to 2024, we can expect StarkWare to build on these impressive achievements and bring more innovations to the thriving Starknet ecosystem.