Starknet Vision

Transcript

so I guess one more question for me who here programs in Cairo raise your hand okay so if I could summarize my mission here it's the next time I ask more hands are up um so thank you very much very happy to be here um I want to tell you well I want to invite you to join the starknet ecosystem which is live and very very interesting and the way I want to tell you about it is to talk about past present and future of Stark knit but I actually want to go in the reverse Direction okay so I want to talk about the future and the concept of broadness

and the need to get there about the present which is about performance and then finish with the past credibility so without further Ado let's start from the future and broadness and what it entails for starknit so um I'm a mathematician by training so I have an affinity to definition so let's try to explain very formally what we're talking about when we talk about broadness and the vision of starknet so integrity means doing the right thing even when no one is watching and we need Integrity for all the operations that blockchain serves we need it for money

for nfts for all of the things that blockchain supports us with and next definition oops let me go back social functions are protocols and Registries or data sets whose value would drop to zero if they lose Broad Social consensus about their integrity so think about money it's a system it's a protocol it also involves Registries its value necessitates that there's Broad Social consensus about its scarcity and its Integrity which entails a lot of things

you know the minting schedule that ownership is managed correctly and so on and so forth if you think about a land registry not land land has intrinsic value but land registry has value only in so much as there is Broad Social consensus about its Integrity that it really does the right thing and ethereum and Bitcoin and all the other that are similar to that are examples of webs of Integrity or Integrity webs which is I think a beautiful definition that Elia from our team came up with that I really like so we all know the World Wide Web which is this thing that allows information to

flow and integrity webs I prefer not using the term blockchain because not blockchain also refers to the specific you know longest chain or a chain of blocks and some of these protocols involve dags and other things so the essence of these things is that they are webs of Integrity so what are these webs of Integrity you can Define them as protocols that are open to all peer-to-peer and their purpose is to implement social functions either specific ones like money which is what Bitcoin does or be infrastructure for any social function which is what ethereum was the first to do um so these are peer-to-peer protocols that Implement social functions first

they have no Central party that controls them that's the most distinctive part that you notice but there's also a positive aspect to them the way they get away with you know the way they don't need a central uh Arbiter is because they have a different way they have this protocol that distributes value to The Operators and the nodes involved in the system in a very fair and equal Manner and they manage to somehow tie the value that is distributed to The Operators to the Integrity of the system so they do this by ingenious ways the first one to really solve this problem was Satoshi and since then we see a lot of different ones but this is a common theme in all of them open to all peer-to-peer

protocols that derive trust in their integrity by some way of Distributing value to the nodes operating and tying that value to the Integrity of the system okay but there's a tension in broadness broadness could be the set of operators that needs to be as big as possible so you want very minimal barriers of Entry to this web this Integrity web but you also want broadness in terms of the social functions that you can support and their scale so you have this tension between decentralization and scale between the broadness of the base of operators that needs to be have very low limits but

also you want maximal scale and this tension is exactly what leads to the scalability problem right if you were to 10x or 100x the throughput or the gas limit on ethereum some machines probably could support this but immediately you would lose or diminish the broadness of the operator set and that's why you don't do this so what we have here now is this tension between the broadness of the operator set and what it can verify Integrity of and the broadness of the set of or the scale of functions that it can support so what is start net start net is yet another example of an Integrity web it's a layer 2 on ethereum that resolves the tension between these two forms of broadness broadness of the

operator set and broadness of scale or of the social function supported and the way it Bridges this is with math in particular Stark validity proofs and what's the way start net works is that allows and invites arbitrarily powerful operators to add capacity or broaden the set of social functions and their capacity without taxing the network of operators or L1 with needing to verify each and every step so we use math in order to bridge this Gap and expand the broadness of the social functions that are supported on ethereum

so if you want to think about this pictorially within ethereum right now we have a lot of integrity and a lot of trust and a lot of value that is supported by it but it's a very limited set of functions and very limited TPS that you can have so with the help of math we open up this to arbitrarily powerful operators that we don't need to have any trust in them and we can do this of course through fractal scaling and further and further recursive implementations of the same methodology and the beauty of it all is that the math sort of is transitive or the Integrity that you get and the assurances that you get flow transitively from ethereum's uh core of

trust all the way out to the outer perimeters so that's what you get with starknit but this entails several things that are very important uh starknet must be open and transparent okay everyone needs to know what's going on and it must be possible for everyone to operate every single aspect of it starknet must have a broad and empowered base of operators leaders governance leaders Community leaders and developers and starknet cannot allow anyone party to control it now currently starkware is very much influential within starknet but according to this vision and these

principles this must change and it will change and um I want to talk a little bit about that so this is about the future and I just want to mention something that if as you broaden the set of social function functions you get this very nice flywheel effect going on because you can support more social functions and at a higher scale and lower cost what you get is a broader set of operators and users that come into the system the system increases and it's both in its integrity and its value and this invites even more social functions to come there and hire throughput so you have this very good flywheel effect that is you know being Unleashed which is what we all want

so this is a little bit about the future of starknet and where we're heading and why it's a good thing to get there now I want to talk about the present which is performance in order to broaden the set of social functions that can be supported by the blockchain you must have enough uh performance or scale to support that and I want to share with you some some information about that so if you go today and look at the current TPS transactions per second as reported by things like L2 beats and others you'll see that we maxed at around three TPS daily TPS measured outside actually our systems work at slightly higher capacity roughly 2x some of the transactions get reverted and are not reported so we can

support a little bit more roughly around six and sometimes even 70 PS but it's still low it's like roughly half of ethereum that's what's happening today now starknet today already has some very very important features and I'll just mention two of them one is that we have Smart wallets or also known as account abstraction and this is the Baseline way the system works right so this is the only way that accounts work is through account abstraction you don't have the eoa addresses of ethereum and this is baked into the base strata of the protocol which leads to a lot of you know nice things happening the reason

that for instance Visa research picked starkner to deploy its sample of of using you know new ways to conduct transactions over Visa is due to there being this level of account abstraction so it's of course we're writing on the shoulders of giants we're implementing the erc4337 suggestion by vitalik or advice many others but it's in inside already the system as it's defined um there's also storage proofs that allow you to invoke and talk about any state of ethereum and if other chains are added you can very efficiently Port over addresses and informations and have

very safe and secure bridges into starknit so this is already today and the last thing I want to say is that Cairo 1.0 is already deployed today it is rust inspired so for those of you who like rust you will love Cairo it is very ergonomic and safe it has strong type systems which are going to prevent you from causing problems for your users it has a safe intermediate representation which is really powerful and allows you to have a Dos prevention mechanisms and also down the line better formal verification and other beautiful attributes and all in all it is a very modern smart contract language even

without its effect on scaling so you should definitely check it out and this QR code here is something you can use in order to start learning a bit more about it um I want to mention if you have more questions about things like Cairo so you have here Cairo co-inventor Leo Goldberg can you please say hi please come out and reach out to him especially those of you restations or programming language experts you'll you'll really enjoy and benefit from just uh you know picking his brain and trying to understand what is what are the design choices behind Kyra 1.0 why are we not you know evm compatible why not solidity all of these questions

please reach out so right now we're at a TPS of around five to six but within a month we're gonna roughly 10x that or more so in our internal measurements we for the next version of the system right now code name version 12 uh but we'll find a different name soon we went from 20 000 steps of our virtual machine inside you know within a second to measuring more than a hundred now our Engineers are very much on the

cautious side so this hundred was really not a hundred thousand steps but more like 250 000 steps with peaks of six hundred thousand steps now what does this translate into and this is coming out in the very next version which is going to be deployed within a month in less than a month so one transfer of veneer C20 token on starknet is roughly 1 000 steps of the Cairo virtual machine which means that now at capacity we can support up to 20 TPS of these transfers you don't see this in day to day because most of the transactions are more complicated to that but erc20 transfers cost we could reach today a TPS of roughly 20. and within a month this will

go up to well over a hundred uh 250 maybe even you know much higher than that and this is all coming within a month and this is all possible not because just of the work of start where I want to mention that the startnet ecosystem has a very large number of extremely dedicated and amazing engineering teams one of the Stellar teams is Lambda class and a lot of the speed efficiency came from the rust Cairo Virtual Machine written by Federico's team Lambda class and we're very proud to have them and many other amazing teams with us of course we'd love to have more of you guys helping us out and joining the system

so the next version coming out in August will have volition which means that you can have users decide where to put their assets if they want them on layer one most of the cost today of a transaction on starknet and this is similar to other Roll-Ups is the data cost on L1 so roughly a transaction costs around half a dollar today on stock net and most of that is the L1 cost so in August we're going to unroll volition which allows users to pick and developers to pick what they want to use they could either use the on-chain data or they could use off-chain data later on when 4844 comes along this will also be integrated and

then users will have at least three different kinds of data availability solutions to come so this is coming out in August and you'll have much lower fees and later down the road will have congestion fee estimates and yeah so what I want to say is that first of all it's very important to understand this starting it right now is open mainnet for deployment you can write your cairo1 contracts and deploy them and there are a number of applications already out there it's really the place right now for develop developers to build but the stuff you're building can already be in production and reaching real users the tvl is growing um and we'll see a lot more of that in

the upcoming days but it's open for business right now so please explore it um I talked a little bit about the vision of broadness and having no one party control it and basically you know Stark were leaving the center and making room and empowering other organizations and institutions so in particular we have the starknet foundation the Staffing is in progress so we have here Diego and sue if you want to also say hi please come and talk to them if you want to learn more about how to get involved in the community we'll share a lot more details on the Exact Staffing but we've already made progress on this and we'll be very happy

to talk to teams who are seeking you know developer grants and want to start working with us granting has already commenced there's a total allocation of 1.2 billion Starks out of the 10 billion initial minting and they're already been 67 early adopter grants announced last week out of 104 applications if you scan this QR code you will see the discussion thread on the forums about this thing there will probably be other rounds so please consider doing that it of course entails you know learning 1.0 writing code and deploying but you will not be sorry if you do this there's also a provisions and rebates allocation of 1.8 or 18 of the initial allocation and there's

Advanced research about how that will play out provisioning to end users and all kinds of other entities that are important for securing the network there'll be details about that later in the summer the Stark net token there is a 10 billion initial minting of tokens there will be inflation details about that so it won't end up with 10 billion tokens there will be inflation as the protocol evolves uh there are three utilities for the token governance it's already in use so all Network upgrades are voted on and other things and we'll expand this the fees for stock new transactions are

going to be in the start net token and this is coming soon hopefully this summer and staking will be the way VIA proof of stake mechanism for um operating the network so there will be additional minting and operator Rewards and if you read the blog posts about the Stark governance proposal it's all about developers first there will be automatic allocation of tokens to developers and smart contract apps and it's all explained in the blog post about this so you can look for start net governance proposal and read there the three blogs and learn more you are very welcome to join this

darknet ecosystem you will probably be in bricked and join the likes of Masters Silve a view Abdel Louis we have a very strong French contingency later today you're going to hear from Elias about Kakarot a very beautiful zkevm on top of starknet please come and listen to that talk there's also Madara and Dojo I see Danilo and Elias are laughing why it's like the wrong Dodger or something okay so um there are a lot of very cool projects by the community um open source projects that basically

involved invite developers to join so please join that one other thing about this there's a meet up this evening you can still sign up hopefully we're trying to expand the number of uh invitees where we'll have an AMA with basically the starknet folks so Elias and Danilo and Alex from Argent will have Diego and Sue and Leo and Elia are decentralization protocol Master answering all the questions that you want so please join us uh it's going to be around six this evening scan the QR code and try to join how much time do I have if I want to leave time for questions

oh I'm done so I will oh I have five minutes including questions or then I get questions including questions okay so I don't want to talk about the past but I want to say we have a lot of credibility we've we've been at scaling blockchains with uh Stark proofs way before the rest and I welcome you to look up the history Starker was founded in 2018 our first product came out in 2019 and we've been settling we're nearing one trillion dollars of uh settled transactions of volume on ethereum and so we have a lot of credibility

and we're not so much about hype we're about delivering really really strong products which I hope developers will appreciate so do I have time for questions okay so I'd love to answer questions [Applause] if you have a question for uh Ellie and start grower starting that team go ahead and raise your hand I see yeah there's someone over there

hi thank you for your presentation um you just mentioned the uh the token the future token uh which which will be a gas token actually uh for the the starting at the L2 which is completely different than other l2s so uh could you just develop a little bit about that thank you yes um so first of all I invite everyone to look up again if you Google starknet governance proposal it's a three blog series um yes the reasoning for the payment of fees in the token and for staking um and for governance they're all the

same reason we it's very important for us to have first of all the control of the system within the parties that are supporting it okay and we of course cannot have you know any one party controlling it and we also want to ensure that um let's say three years down the line suppose some new cool project comes around and is doing like tremendously important work so this could either be infrastructure work or it could be some smart contract that is immensely useful you know some unit swap right so how do we the protocol control and

um over the future of starknet flows to that one party so you could say well we'll have a committee of you know Wise Elders that says oh this you know uniswap is really important as much as we want as much as we can we prefer to have the protocol solve this at a very at a very uh you know protocol level without human intervention so because of reasons like this we do things differently we do a lot of things very differently at Stark net but all of them come from taking a very long-term view about what is right for um you know something that is hopefully going to be there for decades and in

this particular case it's very important that without human intervention new parties that are offering value and supporting the network they don't have to come to some committee and like ask for stuff they will be automatically rewarded by the protocol so that's the short answer to that now there's another question there I see yeah um I think we have time for one more question I I think you had your hand up first I see the the uh okay oh okay hi there so given where Stark Net's going and all the interesting things you you see in all the projects what is the most useful project or use case that you think your platform's capable of that you're not

seeing built today that you're not seeing any developers really go after that's a terrific question um I I I'm very sure that whatever prediction I try to make will fail why um I first of all know that when I saw let's say or ability to predict them in in advance so like if I had to guess now it would say on-chain gaming will be the first thing but I'll probably be wrong okay which is fine uh main thing that um that is really uh very unique about starknet is the massive ability to scale computation

using proofs in a very sort of intelligent and coherent way which which entails from from like thinking about things from the start and like you know for instance having account abstraction baked into the court call and other such things think about gaming but I'll probably be wrong because there'll be some crazy other application um so and I'll be very happy to be wrong but oh if I had to guess I would say it would not be something that today exists on L1 just you know 10x larger that that I don't think will be the distinctive first thing okay so uh please reach out to us find

us again we have Sue Diego Leo and Ilya please all say hi back come up and and we'll be walking around please come with your questions thank you very much [Applause]