StarkNet, one of the four major players in Layer2, has made a new move.

At the just-concluded Paris EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference), one of the hot topics of attention was StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson's announcement that Starknet is about to launch the Starknet Appchain and the release of the high-speed toolkit Starknet Foundry for developing Starknet contracts.

Starknet, developed by StarkWare, is a permissionless decentralized Layer2 protocol based on ZK-Rollup technology, which can help dApps achieve larger computational scale with lower transaction costs using STARK proofs. The network allows smart contracts to interact with other contracts deployed on the blockchain, thereby increasing composability between protocols.

What is an Appchain? In fact, the concept of Appchain was proposed and promoted as early as 2016 by Cosmos and Polkadot. The newly introduced Starknet Application has gained widespread attention in the industry due to its technical advantages and new features such as customizability and decentralization.

For developers, the release of the open-source project Starknet Foundry and the Cairo programming language ecosystem will bring an easier and more efficient development experience.

Starknet Appchain and Its Technical Advantages

In simple terms, the Starknet Appchain is an application-specific blockchain designed to meet the needs of specific applications. Its main advantages include customizability, high throughput, decentralization, and the ability to implement new features not yet supported on the Starknet main chain. It is claimed that the first Starknet Appchain will soon undergo closed testing on the mainnet.

This move by Starknet aligns with the development trend of modular networks in Layer2. Ecosystems such as Optimism, Polygon, zkSync, and Arbitrum have already developed their own Appchains, each reflecting the general advantages of Appchains: alleviating congestion on the main chain and providing more freedom in features.

Customizability

As a customized environment, Starknet Appchain allows applications to customize Starknet instances, enabling developers to better control parameters, reduce costs, scale, and selectively enhance privacy settings for their applications using the native development tools of the ecosystem, Starknet Stack.

The goal of Starknet is to enable any application to deploy its own Starknet Appchain in a permissionless manner. As the most scalable Rollup, Starknet offers various options for configuring various parameters, including consensus, blockchain parameters, and data availability. These application-specific blockchains can meet the unique requirements of various applications in the Starknet ecosystem and allow for platform fine-tuning.

Compared to Appchains in other ecosystems, Starknet's real ace is the STARK proof system—blockchain projects on Starknet can benefit from enhanced security by using the STARK proof system. Compared to other ZK proof systems, STARK proofs are more secure and scalable—their proof generation speed scales linearly, and verification time and proof size scale logarithmically. In other words, the larger the proof, the shorter the total cost and verification time. Additionally, STARK proofs rely entirely on hash and information theory, making them resistant to certain attacks. However, their downside is the initially large scale of proof generation.

High Throughput

The release also mentioned that after launching a customized Starknet Appchain, projects do not need to congest the public Starknet, providing users with higher throughput and a better user experience.

Compared to Ethereum, Starknet itself only requires a sequencer to execute computations off-chain. To reduce data volume, provers generate ZK-STARK proofs for transactions. Finally, verifiers on-chain verify the correctness of the proofs and bundle multiple Layer2 transactions into a single transaction on Ethereum (referred to as Rollup). Therefore, Starknet reduces on-chain execution and storage costs, resulting in lower gas fees and higher throughput.

Decentralization

StarkNet, which highly values decentralization, gives its Appchain decentralized characteristics. The Starknet technology stack allows any application to deploy its own Starknet Appchain in a permissionless manner and allows developers to build customized Starknet instances for applications using Starknet Stack technology.

Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, stated that the decentralized stack makes the network more secure, resilient, transparent, scalable, and innovative. There are no single points of failure, no reliance on a single entity, no "black boxes," and more builders.

New Features

During the presentation, Eli Ben-Sasson also mentioned that the Appchain is customizable and can freely implement features not yet supported on the Starknet main chain, including creating their own fee market logic and consensus mechanisms.

The Starknet Appchain was initially proposed as a Layer2 solution on Ethereum, but as early as 2021, StarkWare introduced the concept of a Layer3 solution. To achieve greater scalability and lower transaction costs, Starknet officially stated that the Appchain will migrate to a Layer3 solution in the future and will also run on the public Starknet network at Layer2.

The new features and experiences implemented in the Starknet Appchain will have an impact on other Appchains or public networks.

Notable Development Use Cases

Madara Sequencer

In the decentralized graph of the Starknet Stack, a recent use case is the birth of the high-performance sequencer Madara Sequencer.

Starknet officials stated that Madara enhances the functionality of the Cairo VM using the Substrate framework, generating provable, secure, and flexible programs, providing Starknet with the ability to create customizable and efficient Appchains. Additionally, Madara will improve Starknet's interoperability and on-chain privacy level.

Based on the Substrate framework, Madara enhances the functionality of the Cairo VM using a decentralized consensus mechanism, generating provable, secure, and flexible programs, which has been well received by developers.

Starknet official data shows that the community development work started in February 2023, involving a community of 45 developers who have been working together to improve Madara, resulting in over 740 commits and over 400 merged PRs to date.

Dojo

In addition to the core components, Dojo is also an important part of the ecosystem for running Starknet applications.

Dojo is a game application development framework in Starknet and the first verifiable on-chain game engine.

In general, due to limitations in scale and cost, most on-chain games are limited to tokenization of in-game assets, and "expensive" and "slow" have always been difficult problems to solve. However, as Starknet gradually achieves cheaper and faster transactions in games, it not only allows users to own in-game assets but also makes the infinite operability of on-chain games a reality. As a result, many game projects have begun technical construction on Starknet.

At the same time, the on-chain game engine Dojo has emerged as a stage for game development, allowing developers to build games on-chain without writing custom code for basic physics, logic, and game mechanics using application technology on the StarkNet platform, making beautiful scenes, fast player movement, and realistic character behavior in games more realistic possibilities.

The growth of technology has allowed more games to develop. Starknet values the incubation of native applications, and its development team StarkWare has held multiple hackathons in collaboration with partners such as MatchBox, Only Dust, Nethermind, and Mask Network, promoting the development of a large number of on-chain game teams. Therefore, games driven by Dojo on Starknet are gradually increasing, including Dope Wars, Influence, Realms, and CafeCosmos, among others.

Impact on Developers

What impact will the emergence of Starknet Appchain have on the developer community?

On the one hand, as mentioned earlier, developers can use the performance of Starknet Stack and the customizability of Appchains to improve the throughput and customized user experience of on-chain projects. On the other hand, at EthCC, the high-speed toolkit Starknet Foundry for developing Starknet contracts was released, and the writing advantages of the Cairo language in the Starknet technology stack will also attract more developers.

Starknet Foundry

In addition to the Appchain, another new move that received attention at this EthCC was the release of the open-source project Starknet Foundry.

This high-speed toolkit for developing Starknet contracts was designed and developed by the former Protostar team at Software Mansion and is also based on a local Cairo test runner and Blockifie written in Rust.

Cairo Language

In terms of programming languages, the Starknet technology stack is supported by the Cairo language—Starknet contracts and the Starknet operating system are written in Cairo, which supports the deployment of almost all business logic. How do experienced developers feel about the Starknet ecosystem and the Cairo language?

Moody Salem, the Chief Solidity Developer at Uniswap, who had never written any Rust before, stated that after learning Cairo for a few weeks, he now finds the efficiency of writing Cairo contracts comparable to Solidity. Itamar Lesuisse, co-founder and CEO of Argent, feels that the Starknet ecosystem feels like early Ethereum, attracting the best talent in the field with its decentralized development and innovative approach.

The latest version of Cairo, V2, is a new Rust-like language available today. It is developer-friendly, easy to learn, and convenient to write, transforming from a niche low-level language into a developer-friendly high-level language.

Additionally, as a general-purpose smart contract language, Cairo has the additional benefit of being ZK-friendly, with very high compilation efficiency. Developers can also generate zero-knowledge proofs for their Cairo code, further reducing gas fees. This is particularly significant due to the network effects of the STARK proof system, which results in decreasing marginal transaction costs as transaction volume increases.

As a result, many applications can find developers to collaborate, hire, or outsource within the Starknet ecosystem, and those on-chain gaming projects requiring large adoption are particularly well-suited for deployment on Starknet.

Conclusion

The release of the Starknet Appchain marks a significant advancement for Starknet, as the four major players in the Layer2 technology stack competition—Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, and Starknet—all have their own Appchain layouts.

However, there are still certain issues with Appchains, including limited composability and atomicity, lack of liquidity, additional resource and management consumption, and limited ecosystem tools. Nevertheless, the growth of Appchains reflects the widespread demand among developers to provide users with a better experience through vertical integration.

Looking ahead, it is worth paying attention to and anticipating which specific application service needs can truly be implemented on Appchains, and how to further improve compatibility, efficiency, privacy, and other aspects to drive faster development of Appchain technology, thereby building a larger Web3 ecosystem.

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