As layer-2 blockchain protocols gain momentum in 2023, Starknet’s ambitious roadmap plans to help the Ethereum ecosystem better serve its users by tackling throughput, latency, and scaling challenges. StarkWare, the company behind the decentralized scaling network, aims to provide substantial throughput increases with lowered gas costs, enabling developers and builders to utilize Ethereum’s computational abilities more efficiently.
Starknet v0.12.0, set to release within the month, represents a six-month sprint of the Starkware team’s work on a Rust-based Sequencer and a Rust-Cairo VM (virtual machine). Developed earlier in the year, the open-source programming language compiler Cairo aims to drive zk-rollup and validity proof-powered decentralized applications (DApps) on the platform. An expected achievement from these efforts is significant increases in transactions per second (TPS), as demonstrated by StarkEx’s performance on decentralized exchange dYdX. StarkEx, another StarkWare-developed layer-2 scaling engine, consistently delivers TPS figures well above Ethereum’s capacity.
The central goal of Starknet’s roadmap is to process at least 10 times Ethereum’s throughput at a tenth of the cost. As Starknet strives to reach this target, the main focus of its 2023 roadmap is optimizing performance, as informed by user and developer feedback. Starknet’s off-chain data availability and reduced transaction costs, enabled by Volition and Ethereum improvement proposal EIP-4844, are set to bolster these performance enhancements. According to StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson, the introduction of a fee market – inspired by traditional market systems – will help prioritize network resources and allow users to signal their willingness to pay for transactions.
The anticipated improvements brought forth by Starknet’s 2023 roadmap include increased transaction throughput, lowered gas costs, and reduced latency. Furthermore, enhanced network resource allocation and faster finality are expected to contribute to a more efficient and scalable Ethereum ecosystem. In the quest for interoperability, various other layer-2 protocols, including Polygon and ConsenSys, have adopted zk-rollups as a means to provide faster and more affordable transactions on the Ethereum network.
While the potential advancements from Starknet’s roadmap are undoubtedly promising, it is crucial to remain mildly skeptical as unforeseen challenges could emerge during development and implementation. There is no absolute guarantee that all of the outlined improvements will be fully realized or that the Ethereum ecosystem will promptly and seamlessly embrace these changes. However, if Starknet’s 2023 roadmap proves successful, the layer-2 blockchain revolution may be one step closer to fully optimizing the features and benefits of Ethereum for its users and developers.
Source: Cointelegraph
