StarkWare, the company behind the Starknet scaling solution, announced today at Eth Denver that it is building Stwo, a zero-knowledge prover designed to reduce latency and transaction costs.
This new prover will be built open-source under the Apache 2.0 license, Oren Katz, the chief operating officer at StarkWare, noted in a press release reviewed by Blockworks. This means that anyone can fork the code, adapt and distribute modified versions of the software.
“Stwo will offer new opportunities for scaling up. And they will be available to everyone, as it will be open source from day one,” said Katz.
In the context of blockchain technology, zero-knowledge provers refer to a computing entity responsible for determining whether given information is accurate or not, without revealing the underlying data. These evaluators must create “proofs” that can then be verified by verifiers.
Read more: How to decentralize a prover, according to an engineer who did it for fun
Stwo won’t be the first open source prover that StarkWare has developed. Currently, the public Starknet blockchain and Starknet app chains use the first generation prover called Stone.
Katz notes that Stwo will be an evolution of the Stone prover thanks to the Circle Stark protocol that Starkware developed in collaboration with Polygon.
According to StarkWare, the Circle STARK proofs of the Circle Stark protocol increase the efficiency of existing STARKs. STARKS on Starknet are considered under the same classification as validity proofs on other zero-knowledge blockchains, which are used to confirm the validity of a specific state.
“Stwo is an evolution of the Stone prover because the Circle Stark protocol bypasses the limitations imposed by the classic STARK protocol. These limitations previously prevented STARK from being used efficiently for smaller fields,” said Katz.
