Founded in 2018, Starkware is an innovative company specializing in developing cryptographic-proof systems utilizing ZK-STARK technology. They design innovative solutions to increase blockchains’ scalability, security, and privacy. Starkware aims to build a faster, safer Ethereum layer-2 blockchain using ZK-STARK technology.
Cairo, the company’s programming language, was launched in 2020. The launch was a key milestone in the company’s development.
In June 2020, StarkWare introduced its first technology. It is the StarkEx, a scaling engine made 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 proving, L3, and more—all come from the brilliant (and very humble 👀) minds of our team and are now industry standards.
We brought all these advancements in just the… pic.twitter.com/gMhtFptUjL
— StarkWare 🐺🐱 (@StarkWareLtd) July 16, 2024
In February, StarkNet launched its native token, STRK. The total circulation supply of STRK is two billion. The firm also announced that STRK staking will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.
Applications of StarkWare
In December 2020, the V2 version was released, which featured 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-minting NFTs
- Perpetual contract trading
- Spot trading
- Payments
- Decentralized finance
- Fair voting
- Unique automated market maker designs
- Data management.
The Future of StarkWare
The team is working on introducing more innovative solutions. The company has scheduled two new versions in the last two quarters. They will let the Starknet community do faster transactions for free, provide a better developer experience, and raise the congestion threshold.
Apart from the updates, here 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 on the Starknet decentralization with Staking and Governance
- Improving on StarkNet to optimize throughput and costs
Lastly, the Stwo Prover is a new open-source prover on which StarkWare is currently working. Stwo will implement the new Circle STARK protocol and several other optimizations. It will unlock the full potential of the very efficient prime field M31. The company will make it available to everyone in the zk-proof and blockchain spaces. This will benefit everyone.
Starknet developers can use an optimized proving experience on all fronts, thanks to the open-source Stwo Prover, which will be faster than the current solutions. This yields faster, lower-cost transactions for users.