Original: The Starknet Stack’s Growth Spurt Translation and Proofreading: “Starknet Chinese Community”
Appchain is a blockchain designed for and tailored to specific application service needs, which was proposed several years ago and has recently gained attention again. StarkWare’s SaaS product StarkEx has provided support for the most successful L2 Appchains running on Ethereum, such as dYdX and Sorare.
Highlights
-
The Starknet technology stack is growing rapidly, allowing users to launch customizable Starknet instances based on their needs
-
Starknet is the highest throughput Layer 2 solution
-
The Starknet developer community is growing rapidly, with the most decentralized Rollup technology stack, and important infrastructure being built by multiple independent teams
-
Stay tuned for the launch of the first Starknet Appchain on the mainnet
Introduction
Public L2 networks on Ethereum are gradually emerging. The most prominent one is the booming development of Starknet, which has developed many use cases in the fields of gaming, DeFi, NFT, AI, and more, thanks to its active developer community.
Appchain is a blockchain designed for and tailored to specific application service needs, which was proposed several years ago and has recently gained attention again. StarkWare’s SaaS product StarkEx has provided support for the most successful L2 Appchains running on Ethereum, such as dYdX and Sorare. As of now (July 2023), StarkEx has processed accumulated transaction volume exceeding trillions of dollars and over 500 million transactions. Starknet Appchain, as a customizable environment, allows applications to customize Starknet instances for better control of parameters, cost reduction, scalability, and selective privacy. The Starknet technology stack aims to allow any application to deploy its own Starknet Appchain in a permissionless manner.
Starknet Technology Stack
The Starknet foundation covers a wide range of applications and use cases, including STARK proofs, the Cairo programming language, and native account abstraction. With Starknet upgrading to version v0.12.0 on the mainnet, Starknet has become the highest TPS (transactions per second) performance L2. Over time, it is expected that Starknet’s performance advantages over other L2s, especially EVM-compatible L2s, will continue to expand, as Starknet breaks free from the traditional limitations set by EVM design and implementation.
However, some applications still need fine-tuning on their platforms, which the Starknet technology stack will help achieve.
In the spirit of the Starknet ecosystem, we follow the principle of “show first, tell later.” However, given the rapid development of the Starknet ecosystem and the high-speed growth of the Stack, the StarkWare team has decided to present some perspectives on the Starknet technology stack. Development work is carried out by the Starknet ecosystem, and the Starknet Foundation coordinates through development partnerships.
The Benefits of the Technology Stack
The Starknet technology stack allows for the launch of custom Starknet Appchains, which can benefit from the general advantages of Appchains, including:
-
Avoiding congestion on the public Starknet chain, providing better throughput and user experience for its users.
-
Appchains can freely implement features that are not supported by the public chain, such as their own fee market logic. From the perspective of the public network, these new features implemented in the Appchain are valuable experiments. Implementing these on the Appchain can generate valuable conclusions that may impact other Appchains or public networks.
In addition to these benefits, the Starknet Appchain will also have additional advantages. Starknet is the most scalable Rollup with options to configure various parameters, including consensus, blockchain parameters, and data availability.
Decentralization
The Starknet technology stack is quickly becoming the most decentralized Layer 2 technology stack. Permissionless blockchains focus on achieving network security and resilience through decentralization. The Starknet Foundation is committed to implementing this feature for Starknet.
“A decentralized technology stack makes the network more secure, resilient, transparent, scalable, and innovative. There are no single points of failure, no reliance on a single entity, no black boxes, and more builders!”
Diego Oliva
CEO, Starknet Foundation
“Starknet is achieving organic decentralization of the stack – different teams are generating optimized versions of core components, and then these versions are fed back into the official release (LambdaClass Rust VM) or trigger entirely new components.”
Nicolas Bacca
Co-founder & CTO, Ledger
Madara
One recent example of the decentralization of the Starknet technology stack is the Madara sorter. Madara is based on Substrate, so it relies on decentralized consensus mechanisms from the start. Community development work started in February 2023. As of now (July 2023), the engineering team, including 45 community developers, has produced over 740 commits and merged over 400 PRs. This effort has resulted in a sorter compatible with the public Starknet, with features such as a configurable memory pool.
LambdaClass
Another notable effort is LambdaClass’s work on building the technology stack that will enable the launch of Starknet Appchains (they also played a key role in the improvements in V0.12.0). LambdaClass is building a Starknet technology stack that will eventually include a prover, a sorter, an execution engine, and a network explorer. In the near future, these different components may integrate with other components of the Starknet technology stack and form a running instance of Starknet.
Community Collaboration, Community Sharing
The goal of the Starknet ecosystem is to have multiple implementations for each individual component in the technology stack. Here is an overview of some different teams and the infrastructure they are developing:
In addition to the core components of the technology stack, there are also some important supplementary components and services that are necessary to run Appchain (all components are in production unless otherwise specified):
-
Block explorers: Starkscan, ViewBlock, Voyager, and LambdaClass’s explorer (under development)
-
Indexers: Apibara, Checkpoint, TokenFlow
-
API services: Alchemy, Infura
-
Cross-chain: LayerSwap, Orbiter, StarkGate
-
Fiat channels: Banxa, Ramp
-
Wallets: Argent, Braavos, Cartridge, and Metamask’s Snap (to be launched in September 2023)
-
Domain-specific application development framework: Dojo (games)
Expressiveness
The Starknet technology stack is supported by Cairo. Its latest version, similar to Rust, conforms to the developer’s habits and has received great enthusiasm from the developer community.
“As someone who has never written any Rust before, I started learning Cairo a few weeks ago, and now I am as efficient in writing Cairo contracts as I am in Solidity. With the upcoming ability to share logic across contracts and built-in fuzz testing, Cairo will be my preferred environment for writing smart contracts!”
Moody Salem
Chief Solidity Developer at Uniswap
Cairo, as a general-purpose smart contract language, has the additional benefit of producing verifiable computations, which is used by one of the fastest-growing blockchain developer ecosystems in history. Applications can find Starknet developers to collaborate, hire, or outsource.
“The Starknet ecosystem feels like early Ethereum. It attracts the best talent in the field with its decentralized development and innovation approach.”
Itamar Lesuisse
Co-founder and CEO of Argent
Future Plans
The Starknet technology stack is still under development and will continue to evolve and improve over the next few years. However, it can already be seen that Starknet Appchain can be run as a hosted service operated by StarkWare. In fact, the first Starknet Appchain will soon launch closed testing on the mainnet (really soon!).
We expect Starknet ecosystem development teams like LambdaClass, Nethermind, and StarkWare, as well as Rollup-as-a-Service, to provide Appchain hosting services. Appchains can choose which technology stack components to adopt and how to run them through hosted services (e.g., StarkWare’s SHARP). Whether to use completely open-source components or proprietary technologies is entirely up to them. That’s the beauty of Appchain—it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, each application can make its own best choice.
Appchain was initially designed as an L2 solution on Ethereum, but it doesn’t stop there. As early as 2021, StarkWare introduced the concept of L3 solutions. We believe that in order to achieve greater scalability and lower transaction fees, Starknet Appchains will migrate to L3 solutions and subsequently operate on the L2 public Starknet network.
Summary
The Starknet technology stack is clearly in a period of explosive growth. We expect that due to improvements in performance, security, and expressiveness, the Starknet technology stack will dominate the Appchain field. The Starknet developer ecosystem is thriving, driving the rapid evolution of the application chain technology stack and will continue to develop to meet the diverse needs of more and more applications.
Original article: https://medium.com/starkware/the-starknet-stacks-growth-spurt-ab7ea3ebd596
Mirror: https://mirror.xyz/starknet-zh.eth/soISxwiwJYlIoTRHiqGMD4-ZLY7itGhgtQbJrG44ql0
Like what you're reading? Subscribe to our top stories.
We will continue to update Gambling Chain; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!
