StarkWare, a leading provider of layer-2 (L2) solutions, has announced that it would make its products open source. Since the beginning of 2023, the total value locked throughout the L2 ecosystem has been increasing.
StarkWare, a layer-2 technology startup, announced plans to open source its Stark Prover software on February 5.
According to the Israeli-based firm, the change would “improve developer accessibility, increase community participation, and provide additional benefits.”
The Prover is the engine that the corporation uses to aggregate hundreds of thousands of transactions.
“We conceive of the Prover as the magic wand of Stark technology,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of Starkware. It marvelously creates proofs that enable for inconceivable scale.”
The company uses zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs to grow Ethereum. ZK rollups are a method of confirming the truth of a statement without exposing what it is. This allows for the processing of partial transaction data away from the root chain, reducing its burden. These rolled-up transactions result in substantially quicker throughput while retaining security.
The Stark Prover will also be renamed the “Starknet Prover” and given an Apache 2.0 license. Some parts, such as Cairo 1.0, Papyrus Full Node, and the new StarkNet Sequencer, have already been made open source by the company.
The ultimate stage in the ecosystem’s decentralization is the open-sourcing of the Prover. The company summarized:
“Open-sourcing the Starknet Prover will take place right before Starknet will be ready for full decentralization. This way, the Starknet stack will be fully open-sourced, as is appropriate for a decentralized, permissionless Layer 2 network.”
“This is a milestone moment for scaling Ethereum, and in a broader sense for cryptography,” Ben-Sasson said at an event in Tel Aviv on Sunday.
Scaling technology from StarkWare is used by various crypto platforms, including ImmutableX, Sorare, and dYdX. The company has completed 327 million transactions, issued 95 million NFTs, and settled $824 billion.
StarkWare launched its StarkNet coin and Foundation in June 2022 and has been working toward complete decentralization ever since.
Since the beginning of the year, total value locked (TVL) in the layer-2 ecosystem has been continuously increasing. L2beat reports a 40% rise since January 1, culminating in a TVL of $5.73 billion today.
With a combined market share of more than 80%, Arbitrum One and Optimism are the industry leaders. According to L2beat, StarkNet TVL has gained 40% since January 1 and is now worth $6.84 million.
