StarkNet – Scaling with a STARK-Based ZK-Rollup - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

Very excited to be here. If you stay till the end, you'll hear a very exciting announcement. Um, but let me tell you a little bit about what we're doing. So, um Are the slides working? Okay.

Have you ever minted an NFT? Raise your hand. Okay. And you paid probably a few dollars or if you know about the gas cost, it probably cost uh I mean, the reason you paid quite a few dollars for minting an NFT is because if you did it on Ethereum, it's because the gas cost is quite large. Well, what if would what if it would cost only 10 gas to mint an NFT under the same security assumptions as Ethereum?

Well, that would be 10,000 x lower gas cost per NFT. And this is something that can be done today. In fact, we've been doing it with our technology um for over a year. So, here is for instance uh a tweet uh you know, bragging about some of the things that our technology does. Uh we've minted for Immutable X, one of our customers, uh 600,000 NFTs inside a proof, and we've done it uh a large number of times.

And each one of these uh NFTs resides on Ethereum. So, instead of paying about 100,000 gas per NFT, you go down to around 10 gas per NFT using this technology, which has been running in production for a while. And I want to tell you a little bit about this technology and about how it's packaged and made for use for developers of infrastructure um and dApps on our newest product, which is StarkNet. So, I want to share some details about that. So, a little bit about the Stark story.

So, Stark is a technology that's based on a lot of deep math that has been going on and being researched for the past 30 years and even a little bit more. And in fact, the way I got into blockchain was I was actually doing theoretical math as a professor of computer science, theoretical computer science for quite a while. And I helped advance this field and make the technology more ready for production. Um first over a number of uh you know, math articles, and then uh into production systems. So, what this technology does at its core is gives you integrity.

And integrity was beautifully defined by C.S. Lewis as meaning, you know, integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching. And if you think about blockchains, they are a new solution to the problem of integrity. You know, how do we know that the right thing is done with our finances, with our valuable information, even if we're not watching?

So, um our technology is a new way to assert integrity even when you're not watching, and even when you have no trust assumptions about the other parties dealing with your data. That's what we deliver. And this technology is not just some abstract pure math. It started off this way, but by now, it's been scaling Ethereum. It is the largest source for scaling Ethereum under Ethereum security assumptions today.

And it's been in production for over 2 years. So, we regularly mint NFTs at 10,000 x lower cost per NFT than Ethereum. We regularly do settlement of perpetual trading at 200 x lower cost for dYdX and similar systems. It's not a monolithic side chain. There are no trust assumptions and we never hold custody of keys of our customers.

That's what we've been doing for a while. And if you take a step back and you think about the world as it is today, we're all familiar with the conventional world, you know, banking for instance, where we hand over custody of our funds to some big computer, but this big computer, in this case it's HAL 9000 from the music from the famous sci-fi film. So, right, some some very smart big computer, but sometimes it could go awry as in that film. This is how you get scale. The other alternative today is to do things on blockchains like Ethereum where verify, don't trust is the motto.

Everyone sees everything that's being done, but it's very slow and expensive. So, what we can do is essentially provide a proof. Now, what is a proof? A proof is something like a receipt you would get from a restaurant. It's something that you can check and know with certainty that the right thing was done when you were not watching.

But, if you just take, you know, hundreds of thousands of transactions and write down a conventional proof, you know, some kind of a restaurant receipt for the way they were processed, checking this would also require as big a computer as the one that's been used to process them in the first place. So, we made no advance. Well, thanks to this math that we, you know, invented and honed and made into a product, you can make the proof much much more succinct, exponentially more succinct, and now everyone can verify a proof, a succinct proof, for a huge batch of transactions on their laptops. And once they can do that, and we can do it also with privacy, which is called zero knowledge, and we can do so at an exponentially faster scale. Again, using this math that's been peer-reviewed and proven.

So now we can send this proof to all these laptops that are running the blockchain that is Ethereum or other blockchains, and that's how we get scale. So the StarkEx system, which has been running in production for 2 years for a lot of customers, in fact, by now it's um six customers, and you know, if you wait till the end you'll hear about another one that's joining us soon. We've traded and settled more than I mean, nearing $1 trillion of assets, minted by far more NFTs on Ethereum than any other solution, including Ethereum itself, and settled by far, by 10x more transactions than any other L2, and actually than all of them combined. Um so that's the StarkEx system. So if you're with a team that is looking for scale, for payments, for trades, for dealing with NFTs, then please talk to us.

The second thing that we're now offering, and this is mostly to developers and builders of infrastructures and smart contracts, is a very scalable version of Ethereum. It's called StarkNet, and you can start developing on it today, and then you'll be joining the dozens and by now hundreds of developers that are actually building both infrastructures and smart contracts over it. You get the same kind of functionality as Ethereum. You can write smart contracts, you have composability, general computation, and it's already live in alpha today. And there's a thriving ecosystem for it.

Now, as part of making it decentralized, we just came out 2 months ago with a very exciting proposal for a token that I want to tell you a little bit about and decentralization. So, first of all, I'll tell you what it's not about. StarkWare, we founded it 4 and 1/2 years ago and everyone was asking back in the day, you know, when token, when token, when token? And we always said, "No, no, no, no." Over all this time, we raised a quarter billion dollars of capital.

So, this token is not about fundraising, okay? What it is about is about empowering developers, okay? And decentralization. So, let me share some details. Um, we published a sequence of three blog posts.

You can find them under the just Googling for StarkNet decentralization proposal. You can see all the details there, including this chart. So, 45% of the initial token allocation of 10 billion tokens are going to developers, core contributors, grants, and also later on, transaction fees and minting will be going to developers on an ongoing and automated basis. And with this system, developers come first. So, if you're a developer and you want to build future-proof infrastructure for Ethereum, on top of Ethereum, that will really scale by using the right, you know, future-proof and technology, then you want to look at StarkNet.

So, why developers first? Obviously, developers are doing the work that is going to make StarkNet, you know, sustainable and a success. And they are also maintaining it and improving it. So, they should get tokens for their work. And these tokens are going to allow them to be part of the proof of stake operation of the system and keep on maintaining and empowering and securing it and also will let them have a say in the governance because the StarkNet token is also a governance token.

So, the way the tokens are going to go to smart contract and infrastructure developers are two different ways. With smart contract developers, we actually know or rather the operating system knows how much value users are assigning to their apps because they're actually, you know, they're going to be gas fees and you can see how much people are paying for this. And then in an automated way, they will get a fraction of the fees in the StarkNet token. So, if you're writing a smart contract and it becomes used by a lot of users, you will be getting automatically StarkNet tokens so you can now be part of the proof of stake operation of the system and also be part of its governance. And if you're a core developer, then it's a bit harder to measure the value of your work because it's not seen by the operating system.

So, we're thinking of ways to still make it a very decentralized way of having tokens flow to developers. And sequencers and provers are of course also going to be getting fraction of the tokens. So, all of this again is detailed over these three blog posts. You can look for them under a StarkNet decentralization and governance proposal. Search for it online.

So, I want to tell you if you're here, please come and talk to us if you want to hear more. I'm joined here by Seebook. Do you want to wave hands? So, if you can't find me, then Seebook over there, please go talk to us. And there are a bunch of events.

So, please you can scan this QR code. This is happening this evening. This is one event that we're going to be joining. Hosted by and organized by Ziki Lend. And here's another event tomorrow.

We'll do a deep dive lunch and deep dive into some of the technology. Uh, I'll be speaking there as well. Um, so you're welcome to sign up for this one as well. And now time for an exciting announcement from a new partner. So, I'm very honored to invite, um, David, CEO and co-founder of Canvas.

Please. Thanks, Eli. Good morning, everyone. I'm David Lavicky. I'm CEO and co-founder at Canvas.

Uh, we've been working closely with the StarkWare team to build layer two scaling infrastructure for the future of finance. So, what is the digital economy? We've heard a lot about this the last few days and it's been ongoing, but it's really early days. We're thinking about the digitization of value. And we believe fundamentally that over time all assets are going to be tokenized.

All value will be tokenized. And the billions of users that are not in blockchain right now will be accessing financial services and products that are powered by DeFi underneath the hood. And so, what we've built together with StarkWare is to enable really easy access and cheap, fast, and gasless access to invest, trade, and transfer in the digital economy. We announced this back in April and we believe that this is one of the coolest applications of StarkWare. So, we've built Canvas Connect, which is essentially a commercial airline for DeFi transactions.

If you think about accessing DeFi today, it's like going on a private jet. You have to pay the gas cost and you are only having one transaction in every, uh, single transaction. So, with Canvas Connect, what we can do is we can put hundreds of thousands of transactions into a single proof and send that to the same layer one dapp on Ethereum. There's no gas cost, there's no surge pricing, and this is the same layer one dapp that's already on Ethereum. So, unlike all layer twos where they have to deploy to a new market and bootstrap a new liquidity pool, this is getting access to the same L1 dapps with no gas cost and the same DeFi destinations that we love.

We're starting out with providing access to top DeFi destinations like Aave, Compound, Ribbon, StakeWise Liquid Staked, and all of this is gasless and with no fee token. So, if you put in $100 in, you can spend the entire balance that's in your wallet. We're really excited about this. We are API first, and so all of this is designed to bring the next wave of adoption. It could be in in web two companies, so providing them APIs and SDKs that they can integrate these gasless DeFi services and provide invest, trade, and transfer to their clients.

As well for web three companies, we're working with institutional grade custody platforms like Fireblocks. So, all customers on the Fireblocks network can roll out these services quickly and easily to their customers. Also, of course, for all of the self-custody wallets, all of this is web three native. There's no changes, there's no compromises to the Ethereum security. All of this inherits the security of Ethereum, and it uses the ZK power of StarkWare to achieve uh gasless services.

So, we're very excited today. Thank you to Eli for inviting us along. We're announcing testnet access. So, please go to our website, scan the QR code, register on our website, and get access to our testnet. And uh over time, we'll be going to mainnet within 90 days, and we're very excited to see you uh join us on this journey.

And I just want to say love lastly, thanks to Eli, Uri, and the entire StarkWare team for supporting us. The StarkWare community is amazing, and we're really happy to be a part of it. We look forward to seeing what you can build together with Canvas and StarkWare. Thank you.