StarkWare to open-source STARK Prover as it progressively decentralizes

StarkWare, the team building two layer-2 scaling solutions on Ethereum in StarkNet and StarkEx, will open source the technology behind STARK Prover.

Open Sourcing StarkNet Prover

In a Medium post on Feb. 5, StarkWare said they would make the code behind STARK Prover available to the public, releasing the technology to anyone interested. The code shall be released under Apache 2.0 license when the STARK Prover is rebranded to StarkNet Prover.

Under the Apache 2.0 license, developers would be free to copy code behind STARK Prover, introducing them in their solutions without worrying about copyright infringement or royalties demand. Moreover, developers are free to copy and make alterations during their integration. 

StarkWare has already open-sourced some of its innovations. Earlier, they released to the public domain the code behind Papyrus Full Node, which is a Rust implementation of the StarkNet full node, and the StarkNet sequencer, a tool responsible for ordering transactions and producing blocks in the layer-2 platform. The team has also open-sourced Cairo 1.0 in late November 2022. Cairo is a Turing-complete programming language that supports verifiable computation and will be supported by StarkNet in Q1 2023. 

The decision to eventually make public the code behind StarkNet Prover is called on the team’s desire for accessibility to developers while promoting collaboration within the community. By open-sourcing, the blockchain development community would also take part in maintaining and improving the layer-2 platform. This provides the “most genuine path to build StarkNet as a decentralized public good”.

“Open-sourced STARK software will allow the community to maintain and develop the network independently, and therefore provides the most genuine path to build StarkNet as a decentralized public good. It will also allow the community more freedom to contribute to the development of the prover, and therefore of StarkNet.”

Scaling Ethereum

StarkWare is among the many layer-2 scaling providers for Ethereum, including Arbitrum and Optimism. However, unlike Arbitrum, whose solution involved “rolling up” or bundling transactions off-chain, StarkWare introduces a zero-knowledge method to make transactions more secure. Nonetheless, as a layer-2 solution of Ethereum, all transactions must be re-routed from the mainnet, relieving the primary layer. 

The code behind the StarkNet Prover will be based on a prover used by StarkEx to power dApps such as ImmutableX, dYdX, and others.