StarkNet - Next steps

Transcript

sleep okay um hi everyone thanks for having us here at uh ecc it's always a pleasure to see the amazing community that is in europe and in particular in france in paris um i'm going to talk about next steps for starknet and in particular about governance and also things like the starknet token and the startnet foundation but for those who are uh who just happen

to be here by chance and don't know quite what stark starkwear and starknet are i'm going to give just a very brief a few minutes just introduction so those who know this i apologize so a little bit the abridged stark queer and starknight story our technology is the culmination of 30 years of pretty advanced math and starkware is very proud to be at the forefront of making all of this practical through a series of inventions and creations that most of them were done within our company and and a few uh by

co-founders and researchers and colleagues so this includes the stark fry velidium as a data availability model the cairo virtual machine and programming language the concept of layer 3s and recursion if you attended the views talk yesterday then you probably heard about that at the core what all of this technology offers you is integrity which means the ability to know that the right thing was done even when you were not watching and we're talking about knowing that a computation done off chain was done correctly according to the specification of the program and this is very important in the context of blockchains

now today we are proud to be the entity that is pretty much scaling ethereum as a standalone layer two by the greatest amount and extent in terms of tps and volume transacted the starkic systems are hauling um more than all the other l2s combined and we're doing so under with no change to the security assumptions of ethereum but you always need to read the fine print and the fine print says well there's a single operator currently for the starkx systems and also for the starknet systems and that single operator of course means that in terms

of liveness and censorship resistance there's room to improve and that's why we're talking today so those of you who are already signed up to start net cc tomorrow you'll hear a lot more about all of this deep dives into cairo and starks and you'll see the ecosystem and uh now i want to tell you a little bit of about what starknight is so oh sorry before that four milestones over four years first we built by hand um the system that was starkx the first version that allowed us to scale but then in order to make things more scalable in terms of the ability to add features quickly we developed cairo and you you'll hear a lot about cairo

tomorrow those attending startnet cc and then we use that to improve on the starcx system building systems such as dydx and we're proudly serving also surveyor immutable diversify and others and starknet is the latest thing that we've been doing so what is starknet it is a decentralized permissionless stark-based validity roll-up offering scalable and secure ethereum-like state so if you know ethereum and you know what it gives all the good that it gives that's pretty much stark net but at much greater scale under the same assumptions as ethereum just greater scale it is a layer two you can write smart

contracts today it's already live in alpha on mainnet for almost a year general computation composability all the good stuff now it works very similar to ethereum transactions are submitted to a mempool and then they are sequenced by a sequencer and then there's approver that generates a stark proof for the integrity of all this computation was done off chain and all nodes of ethereum verify the proofs and the proofs are exponentially smaller than the amount of transactions covered by such a proof thereby you get your scale and the mathematics and cryptography of starks assure you that the right thing was done even when the ethereum nodes were not

watching so this system again is live on mainnet today now there are dozens of external teams that are building an amazing um and thriving ecosystem um with a lot of infrastructure and tools and um you know this showed up in the number of downloads came after our announcement of uh the token and foundation and but even before that there were thousands of nodes running and uh thousands of developers working on this platform so this was a brief introduction for those who don't know what stark net is what starkware is and now i want to get to the meat of this talk which is what are our next steps for starknet how do

the foundation and token fit in and what is the vision and essence and what inspired us when we came to think about and design these structures so the vision is that starks as a technology should be public infrastructure a public good something that is non-exclusive exclu exclusionary um non-rival versus inclusive like ethereum like the internet and this core technology this mathematical technology has actually made such public infrastructure by starknet so starknet as a blockchain

layer two is the way we see the core technology being public infrastructure available to all for the good of you know of all of us now so far if we look back at this last year or so since starknet has been live in alpha and mainet the functionality is pretty good developers there's always room to improve but developers can write a lot of smart contracts that are meaningful to users the throughput is being improved it can be better we have already publicly said that we hope that by the end of this year we'll do 10x throughput of ethereum at

amortized cost of one over a hundred uh smaller than the fees of ethereum and we're confident we're going to reach that hopefully maybe even more and in terms of decentralization well that is exactly what we're going to talk about today the decentralization of the network so that it becomes so that it is and maintain the public good now decentralization is very hard things like you know decentralization freedom governance there are many many different ways to define and think about them and i want to share with you what underpins our view of this it has to do with developer inclusivity which means we are trying we're putting

developers first and we would like to solve the following problem we would like that two years five years ten years down the line if there are new developers that are coming in and do valuable work that improves the system via software maybe someday hardware we want them to be automatically compensated via the token the starknet token and they should be compensated so that they have a say on the governance and they can influence where the system is going and also are offered to be part of the network that is servicing and operating it in terms of nodes running the system it is very important for us to solve

this problem and that's at the core of what we've designed now we believe that if we solve this devs are going to build a platform that is going to be very very helpful and useful as a public good for users and users are really the true and ultimate citizens of this uh you know of web 3 or of the this world that ethereum and we are trying to build so the star core was founded four years ago more than four years ago and it was founded at the height of the um ico season for instance filecoin and

tezos both raised around a quarter billion dollars at the time and we raised uh you know compared to this a meager six million now everyone around us you know uh investors and consultants and so on we're saying you you should announce an ico and a token and we said no and we were asked since then you know when token and for four years we said no or rather the formal answer was no comment and now suddenly things changed now in the interim we raised over several rounds more than a quarter billion dollars of equity and what i want to say is that the answer to why token or when token has nothing to

do with uh raising funds or so on that's not the reason the reason is something very different the reason that we're now saying yes is that it is needed for starting a decentralization okay and here's a story that we experienced in the past and is a bit of an inspiration for why we're putting developers first so the very one of the very first blog posts that we wrote when starkware was founded said okay here's the business model we would like to use we would like to build this uh amazing infrastructure that is you know making starks available for

more integrity at scale and this infrastructure is going to be part of maybe several different blockchains so we would like to do tech for token we would like to do work developing software and research that is going to improve these other networks and we would like to be uh um to get and return tokens um and and then you know this is the way we wanted our business model to work and what we realized after talking to many many chains is that chains just don't work this way you know mining rewards pretty much go all of them to uh or nearly all of them go to uh miners right that are doing very

important work but they don't really go to developers and it's just not done and most of the foundations usually have a finite maybe very large um finite amount of tokens that have to last for eternity and it's very it's very hard for them to to to make such uh deals now this is the inspiration we're not doing now something that is tech for token but it is the inspiration when we came to thinking about stark net for maybe we can try and have it so that others will have a different experience and we would like developers to get start knit tokens for the valuable work that they are doing for starknet and as a

consequence of that they will be in charge of the governance and also be part of the operators of the system through sequencing and proving and this way especially if we can do it somewhat automatically will also help the increase the inclusivity meaning that people newcomers can come and be part of the ecosystem okay now let's talk a little bit about where stark net today is on the decentralization continuum so there are certain aspects that are centralized and we discussed this a little bit the operator of starknet and a lot of the core software are written and maintained and operated only

by starkware but there are other very important aspects that are decentralized today the most important one is that the security layer is that of ethereum as in layer one and it's very decentralized and very secure also a lot of the infrastructure such as wallets full nodes apis is being written by external parties and it's the this ecosystem is growing very rapidly by now most of the hackathons education and onboarding of new developers is actually done outside of starkware again starknet cc is one such example and we see this like big beautiful wave that we are just becoming one drop in and we're very happy of that and of course smart

contracts and dapps are all built by by external teams so we're somewhere on the spectrum so what do we need to do more and why do we need to do more we need startnet to we need to ensure that starknet never depends on any single one party including stark where even though stark were you know came up with some of the core ideas and technology and um what this means is and why we need this so you need to decentralize operators to maintain liveness right if starkware tomorrow just shuts down you still need the system to be um you know the state to move forward and people to submit transactions you also need to prevent censorship uh what happens if starkware decides or is a you know

needs to censor certain transactions this cannot happen so we need decentralization of operation we also need decentralization of the whole process of development so there is transparency to the way upgrades are being done and where the system is moving towards and we also needed to be inclusive and participatory so that you know people can come on and improvement all the time so this is what we need to uh address and now the question is okay if starcore is as a single operator and as a as a main developer of the core software is stepping taking a step back then who takes the reins and how do we control this and the answer we're giving now this is you know the next answer

right but there will be further steps down the line is that we nee we we believe that a governance token and the assistance of a foundation are the next immediate steps on this furthering decentralization path so the mission of the foundation is to maintain starknet as a public good and to develop test and implement community decision making processes the token is used to define the community to give governance rights to those who are advancing the ecosystem and to um and as a as a currency for fees and

fermenting sorry fees and minting are being done also for operating system but also for work being performed by developers now the foundation is going to be allocated slightly more than half of all tokens minted thus far and it's going to be funded by a one-time grant of these tokens from starkware it is right now being set up and more details are going to be appearing as it's uh you know as it's up and running the token will be required for three things for governance voting on important things it will be required for paying transaction fees in the native starting a token and it will be required for staking if you want to be one of the

operators of the system we published a three post series and i encourage you all to read it and we explain they're in great detail you know all the reasoning and how we're doing it this is one of the pie charts that appears there it gives the allocation and there's more explanation there there are 10 billion tokens that have been minted so far and there will be ongoing further minting right so the circulating supply is not going to stay fixed at 10 billion what i want to do here is just highlight a few things that are also mentioned there the first one is that roughly third

just slightly less than 33 are going to core contributors and here what we are doing is putting both starker employees and consultants everyone who is in this chunk gets the tokens under a four-year lock-up with a one-year cliff and gradual release just to emphasize these tokens under this portion are not being vested they are unconditional unlock and the last thing i want to mention is that this part also covers the many many developer partners that are strategically aligned with um startnet and its mission and i won't

read the whole list because it's uh long there's actually a few more that we haven't announced yet and i also want to take this opportunity i also wrote in a tweet previously that there's an exciting announcement that i want to make so the announcement is we have um we're very proud to partner with the local paris-based ledger hardware wallet team and we have a new strategic partnership with them between starknet and ledger [Applause] we've been working with ledger for a very long time and uh they're like you know one of the best out there so we're very very happy that ledger is also going to be supporting start stark net

transactions from the get-go at a very high level so now we have these as well we also have ledger and more going to be announced all of this comes from this chunk that is roughly one-third of the tokens allocated another point i want to highlight is that more than half slightly more than half are going to the foundation and the foundation is going to be very independent from from starkware but you'll see more details when they emerge inside this 50 18 are going to users under rebates and provisions so that's where users are going to be allocated funds and the last thing i want to say again

highlighting developers first is that a very large chunk nearly 50 is going to various developers both the ones who are core contributors and via grants are going to go to developers on an ongoing basis these grants are going to be uh made once the foundation is up and running now the last thing i want to focus on is on initial thoughts on how the ongoing automatic flow of fees and minting will go to developers so developers are doing work to build and maintain stark net they're going to get tokens so that they can influence the governance and operate it and here you need to distinguish between

two kinds of developers there are those whose work can be measured by the startnet system namely smart contracts you can measure gas and how much people are paying fees for using these smart contracts and on the other side you have the core devs that are harder to measure their contribution people running writing the code for provers or for wallets or full nodes it's harder to measure through the echo through the network their contribution so when it comes to automatic compensation via tokens it's a bit easier to solve it for the guys on the left and what we want to do is that a fraction of the layer two fees

that are being paid are going to go to the smart contracts for which they were paid to use and also minting of new uh issuance of of tokens a portion of that will go to cover the l1 ethereum fees that are burned um used by those smart contracts right and we'll make sure so you have anti-gamification methods we'll make sure that these fractions are always strictly less than one so that it you know it's there's no incentive for a sequencer approver just to add stuff in order to get more minting or fees now when it gets to core devs you're going to have to have some human discretion and that human discretion on how to

allocate proportion of fees and minting that will go to them this will be defined at a later time i want to close just by wrapping up and just reminding you of the vision our vision is that devs come first they are going to be receiving tokens before you know community rebates and provisions right you know some people may find that you know they think that users should come first we made a strategic decisions the developers come first developers will receive a portion of fees and minting to compensate them for their work to give them a say at the governance

think of this developer who's now you know in in college or in high school and five years down the line is going to do some amazing work we want them to be automatically joining the table and influencing without needing to write you know some proposal to some committee to to give them power we want them to be part of those operating the network the benefit of everyone if we succeed in this and there are many many question marks here then hopefully start net will become a public good or more so and you know perpetually maintained and improved like ethereum and starknight will scale ethereum to meet global demand and because it's ethereum

you know we have to put a rainbow somewhere so here it is thank you very much i think i have two minutes happy to answer questions [Applause] [Music] i can sing something meanwhile i think they won't record it what do you see as the impediments to the growth of stark net like when you wake up and say what will keep it from

growing as fast as you want maybe beyond what stark net can provide what are the limitations is it hardware software demand etc certainly not demand today it's not hardware i would say that today it's within the software stack just having an even better developer experience and more tooling and of course as you scale any infrastructure think about internet bandwidth at any given point in time there'll be some bottleneck and you know you remove that one and then there's another bottleneck right now we are unrolling us there are some things about the

sequencer which by the name it is you know somewhat sequential that we're trying to improve so i mean that's one of the current bottlenecks but once we remove that this is just you know the next few months once we remove that they'll probably be others we're not yet at the stage where hardware is is a limiting factor not yet hi ellie um big fan over here ah okay i'm a big fan of starkware but also you i wanted to ask so right now your technology is mainly um your your main goal was to scale ethereum um

other zke rollups for example focus on privacy uh i was wondering if you had any plans for privacy preserving transactions either on startnet or something like that yeah that's a terrific question so you already get you're gonna get some version of privacy by doing things like layer three or if you look today at the starkx systems especially those that are running in validium and not in roll-up mode there's already pretty good privacy preservation for users from the blockchain the operator of the system knows a lot about them that's the way it's currently

but it's also a you know a somewhere on the continuum of privacy it also gives you some some answer now it's very easy to make the starks zk starks making a fully privacy preserving system that is usable is you know uh big entities like exchanges and um and and you know custodians and so on can use it uh from a regulatory point of view from a user experience point of view and many other things it's a much much much bigger challenge um you you may know i was one of the founders of zcash and i mean and you see there the the hardness of of you know getting wallets to actually do shielded transactions and

things like that it's not an easy task and the reality is that if you look at blockchains today users i mean users vote with their tokens to say that they don't care as much about privacy it is a fact like you know like monero z cash tornado cash they're not top 10 or top 20 so so it's the reality once there's we will have privacy once there's bigger demand of course this will become a higher priority but the reality is that it's not the most burning thing for users until it is yes

i think my time is up i don't know but okay thank you very much