At the EthCC Ethereum Community Conference held in Paris, StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson announced the launch of the Starknet Foundry, an ultra-fast toolkit for developing Starknet contracts, and teased the upcoming release of Starknet Appchains.
According to the official Starknet stack introduction document released by StarkWare, Appchains are application-specific blockchains designed to meet the specific needs of certain applications. Starknet Appchains are primarily used for customization, allowing applications to customize Starknet instances for better control, lower costs, larger scale, and optional privacy. By creating Starknet Appchains, applications can provide better throughput and user experience for their users.
StarkWare states that their SaaS product StarkEx is empowering L2 Appchains on Ethereum, such as dYdX and Sorare. As of July 2023, StarkEx has processed over $1 trillion in cumulative trading volume and over 500 million transactions.
The Starknet stack, which includes STARK proofs, the Cairo programming language, and native account abstraction, has attracted multiple applications and use cases. With the upgrade of Starknet to v0.12.0 on the mainnet, Starknet has become the highest TPS performance L2, and it is expected that Starknet's performance advantage over other L2 solutions, especially EVM-compatible L2, will continue to grow over time.
The Starknet stack is supported by Cairo and driven by the Starknet ecosystem, with development efforts carefully planned by the Starknet Foundation and its development partners.
What are the advantages?
The Starknet stack allows applications to launch customized Starknet Appchains, providing advantages such as:
- Preventing congestion on the public Starknet and providing better throughput and user experience for its users.
- Appchains may be able to implement functionalities not supported by public chains, such as their own fee market logic.
- Starknet Appchains are the most scalable Rollup and can be configured with various parameters, including consensus, blockchain parameters, and data availability.
Decentralization
The Starknet stack is rapidly becoming the most decentralized L2 stack. The Starknet Foundation is committed to achieving this feature for Starknet.
Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, states that a decentralized stack makes the network more secure, resilient, transparent, and scalable, with no single point of failure, no reliance on a single entity, no "black boxes," and more builders.
One recent example of decentralization in the Starknet stack is the Madara Sequencer. Madara is based on Substrate and relies on out-of-the-box decentralized consensus mechanisms. The community development work started in February 2023 and has generated over 740 commits and over 400 merged PRs from 45 community developers.
In terms of building a stack that allows the launch of Starknet Appchains, LambdaClass is building a Starknet Stack that will eventually include provers, sequencers, execution engines, and network browsers. In the long term, these different components can be integrated with other components of the Starknet stack to create Starknet instances.
Ecosystem & Community
The goal of the Starknet ecosystem is to have multiple implementations for each component in the stack. The following image provides an overview of different teams and the infrastructure they are developing:
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In addition to the core components of the stack, there are important supplementary components and services that will run Appchains, including:
- Blockchain browsers: Starkscan, ViewBlock, Voyager, and LambdaClass's browser (under development).
- Indexers: Abibara, Checkpoint, TokenFlow.
- API services: Alchemy, Infura.
- Bridges: LayerSwap, Orbiter, StarkGate.
- Deposit services: Banxa, Ramp.
- Wallets: Argent, Braavos, Cartridge, and Metamask's Snap (to be launched in September 2023).
- Domain-specific application development frameworks: Dojo (for games).
Next Steps
The Starknet stack is still under development and will continue to evolve and improve in the coming years. Currently, Starknet Appchains can be run as managed services operated by StarkWare. The first Starknet Appchain will soon launch a closed beta on the mainnet.
StarkWare expects that Starknet ecosystem development teams such as LambdaClass, Nethermind, and StarkWare, as well as Rollup-as-a-Service providers, will offer managed services for Appchains.
Appchains will choose their own stack components to run as well as components run through managed services, such as StarkWare's SHARP. They may choose to rely on strict open-source components or proprietary technologies.
It is worth mentioning that Appchains are initially L2 on Ethereum but will not exist in the long term. As early as 2021, StarkWare introduced the concept of L3. StarkWare believes that to achieve higher scalability and lower transaction costs, Starknet Appchains will migrate to L3 and operate on the L2 public Starknet.