Today, Israeli startup StarkWare announced plans to make its STARK Prover software open source. StarkWare is the creator of the well-known Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions StarkEx and StarkNet.
StarkWare uses the zero-knowledge rollups technology, which bundles thousands of transactions together off-chain and then verifies them on-chain for a tiny fraction of the cost, to assist the world’s largest smart contract platform in accomplishing faster and less expensive transactions.
About the announcement
Today, StarkWare revealed its intention to provide the source code for its STARK Prover, an engine used to create cryptographic proofs that may condense millions of transactions for submission to Ethereum into a small amount of data no larger than a smartphone snapshot.
Additionally, Starknet and StarkEx, systems that purportedly scaled more transactions on Ethereum than all other L2 scaling solutions put together, are powered by the same technology.
Eli Ben-Sasson, the president of StarkWare, commented on the situation and said, “This is a watershed moment for scaling Ethereum, and in a broader sense for cryptography. It will restore STARK technology to its proper status as a common good that will be used for everyone’s benefit.
Previously faced criticism
The business had previously been under fire from the cryptocurrency community and providers of competing products like ZK Sync and Polygon for keeping ownership of its technology’s intellectual property, which is against the open-source and interoperable ideals of blockchain.
Cairo 1.0, a programming language and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) substitute developed by StarkWare, as well as the Papyrus Full node, are already open-source. The business is also in the process of making its new sequencer open-source.
