Founded in 2018, Starkware is an innovative company specialized in developing cryptographically secure systems using ZK-STARK technology. They design innovative solutions to increase the scalability, security and privacy of blockchains. Starkware aims to build a faster, more secure Ethereum layer-2 blockchain using ZK-STARK technology.
Cairo, the company’s programming language, was launched in 2020. The launch was an important milestone in the company’s development.
In June 2020, StarkWare introduced its first technology. It is the StarkEx, a scaling engine created in-house and used on Ethereum.
Later, in November 2021, StarkNet’s Alpha was released on Mainnet. This expanded the company’s presence in the blockchain space.
StarkWare: six years of pure innovation for scalability
STARKs, Validium, proof aggregation, Cairo, recursive proof, L3 and more: they all emerged from the brilliant (and very humble 👀) minds of our team and are now industry standards.
We’ve brought all these improvements in just the… pic.twitter.com/gMhtFptUjL
— StarkWare 🐺🐱 (@StarkWareLtd) July 16, 2024
In February, StarkNet launched its own token, STRK. STRK’s total circulation is two billion. The company also announced that STRK staking will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.
StarkWare Applications
In December 2020, the V2 version was released, which included Cairo-generated STARK proofs, support for ERC-721, and a faster connection to the Ethereum mainnet.
StarkWare’s STARK technology has made it possible to scale a variety of use cases on the blockchain.
These use cases include:
- Mass hitting NFTs
- Trade perpetual contracts
- Spot trading
- Payments
- Decentralized finance
- Vote fairly
- Unique automated market maker designs
- Data management.
The future of StarkWare
The team is working on introducing more innovative solutions. The company has planned two new versions in the past two quarters. They will allow the Starknet community to make faster transactions for free, provide a better developer experience and increase the congestion threshold.
In addition to the updates, there are a few more things the team will be working on in the near future:
- Become the first L2 on Ethereum and Bitcoin
- Continue working to decentralize Starknet with Staking and Governance
- Enhancing StarkNet to optimize throughput and costs
Finally, the Stwo Prover is a new open source prover that StarkWare is currently working on. Stwo will implement the new Circle STARK protocol and several other optimizations. It will unlock the full potential of the highly efficient M31 prime field. The company will make it available to everyone in the zk-proof and blockchain spaces. This will benefit everyone.
Starknet developers can enjoy an optimized proof experience on all fronts, thanks to the open-source Stwo Prover, which will be faster than current solutions. This results in faster and cheaper transactions for users.