Notice | StarkNet Alpha 1

introduce

Earlier this year, we announced that StarkWare was building a Stark-based Zk-rollup. 1  Plan & have spent StarkNet. StarkNet is a Layer2 network based on ethereum, which is permission-free and decentralized. It can extend the computing power of dapps without sacrificing the composability and security of Ethereum.

Last month, StarkNet Alpha 0& NBSP; Has been released (The Chinese version). For the first time, developers can write smart contracts and deploy them on zK-Rollup without a license. Users can have an Ethereum-like experience when sending transactions to the StarkNet network.

Today (July 19), we released a new version, Alpha 1. In order for developers to experience new features as soon as possible, we publish features in a scrolling fashion. We hope this will shorten the feedback cycle so that we can quickly improve StarkNet based on community feedback.

Alpha 1 includes a two-way messaging protocol between L1 and L2 that allows developers to achieve seamless transactions between L1 and L2. Developers can now send messages from contracts on L1 to contracts on L2 and vice versa.

One of the advantages of zK-rollup is that status updates are final and there are no delays. This means that messages sent from L2 to L1 can be sent immediately to the target contract. This opens up the possibility of building truly interoperable applications between L1 and L2.

Want to try Alpha 1? Click here for a tutorial.

Thank you for L2 projects such as Optimism and Arbitrum. Their previous work provided a lot of inspiration for our design of two-way messaging protocols.

Now, StarkNet status updates will also be posted to Ethereum as on-chain data. This way, any user can fully build StarkNet's state from L1 data. Each state update includes state differences, that is, parts of the stored data that have changed and new values.

Alpha1 also takes full advantage of the zK-rollup. In contrast to an Optimistic Rollup, which requires full transaction data to be sent to the chain, the ZK-rollup requires only the minimum amount of data needed to find state differences to be sent to the chain.

A good example is the price input mechanism. A transaction that updates the price input mechanism typically involves multiple transactions, but updates only one storage unit, the price of the related transaction pair. In Optimistic Rollup, the data required to be published to the chain for a single state update increases linearly with the number of included price input mechanism transactions; In zK-Rollup, however, only one storage item update is always provided.

In addition, the compression algorithm can be applied to published data, whose effectiveness was demonstrated by STARK, further reducing the on-chain footprint. Future releases of StarkNet will continue to innovate in this area.

StarkNetOS

We also released the StarkNet operating system code. StarkNetOS is the Cairo program that runs StarkNet and handles all operations on the network -- contract deployment, transaction execution, L1 and L2 two-way messaging, and more. We will publish a separate article detailing the architecture and design of StarkNetOS.

Other features

In addition to the StarkNet Alpha iteration, we are also improving Cairo. If you want to get a full overview of Cairo V0.3.0's new capabilities, check out the release notes.

Ecological prosperity

In addition to the work on StarkNet Core, development around the entire StarkNet ecosystem is also ongoing. We are delighted to be working with some of the best teams in Ecology.

StarkNet's first full-node project, Fermion, was developed by the Erigon (formerly TurboGeth) team. With the Erigon team's extensive knowledge and experience in developing Ethereum, and the scalability of our STARK proof, we will work with the Erigon team to build a strong full node.

Nethermind is developing a compiler Warp from EVM to Cairo. We only show new tools when they are ready for release, so be patient for the good news to come! We can assure you, the good news is coming fast.

Future plans

The next stop for StarkNet will be composability -- enabling interaction between contracts. Stay tuned.