- StarkWare has fulfilled its promise to open-source its STARK prover, a core technology for the Starknet zk-rollup, aiding Ethereum’s scalability by moving transaction execution to rollups.
- The layer 2 Starknet blockchain team has also announced that a code review will take place on 31 August at a conference in San Francisco.
- This move contributes to StarkWare’s claim of having the most decentralized rollup stack, with additional plans to open-source the new sequencer in the future.
In February, StarkWare, the company behind Ethereum layer 2 blockchain Starknet, promised to open-source their STARK prover.
The team is now following through on its promise. The code will be made available on 31 August during a Starknet summit session in San Francisco.
The prover is a crucial piece of technology that underpins the Starknet zk-rollup, which StarkWare launched on mainnet in 2021 and upgraded significantly in July.
The Ethereum scaling roadmap is based on moving transaction execution away from the mainnet and onto rollups, which group bunches together. Zk-rollups submit proofs of transaction batches, saving Ethereum network blockspace.
According to Eli Ben Sasson, president and co-founder of Starkware, the prover is “a vital component within our tech stack. We see it as the STARK technology’s magic wand, [which] plays a critical role in helping Ethereum scale.”
In a blog post published Tuesday, the company stated that the move “is a significant step forward in decentralizing Starknet.”
Polygon was the first to open-source their prover, though they did so under the AGPL v3 license. Matter Labs has stated that its zkSync version will follow suit.
Starkware has been called out in the past for using a closed-source prover even though open-sourcing this component was always a goal. StarkWare’s commitment became more concrete in February 2023 when the company announced it would use a more permissive Apache 2.0 license.
“Open-sourcing the Starknet Prover will allow more eyes to review the code, improve its quality, help detect bugs, and provide transparency,” StarkWare explained.
In following through with its aim, StarkWare claims to have “the most decentralized rollup stack,” which includes key infrastructure components such as its programming language, Cairo, and multiple implementations of full nodes.
