What is the Starknet application chain? How will it work?

Author: Starknet Compiler: Karen, Foresight News

At the Ethereum Community Conference EthCC held in Paris, StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson announced the launch of Starknet Foundry, an extremely fast toolkit for developing Starknet contracts, and previewed the launch of Starknet application chains (Appchains).

According to the Starknet stack introduction document officially released by Starknet, Appchains is an application blockchain specially designed to meet the needs of specific applications. Starknet Appchains are mainly used to customize the environment, where applications can customize Starknet instances. For greater control over specifications, lower costs, greater scale, and optional privacy. By creating a Starknet application chain, applications can provide their users with better throughput and user experience.

Starknet stated that StarkWare’s SaaS product StarkEx is empowering L2 application chains on Ethereum, such as dYdX and Sorare. So far (as of July 2023), StarkEx’s cumulative transaction volume has exceeded $1 trillion and processed more than 500 million transactions.

Starknet stack

Building blocks of Starknet such as STARK proofs, the Cairo programming language, and the native account abstraction have attracted multiple applications and use cases. As Starknet is upgraded to v0.12.0 on the mainnet, Starknet becomes the L2 with the highest TPS performance, and it is expected that Starknet’s performance advantage over other L2s (especially EVM-compatible L2s) will grow over time.

The Starknet stack is powered by Cairo, with development driven by the Starknet ecosystem and curated by the Starknet Foundation through its development partners.

What are the advantages?

The Starknet stack allows applications to launch custom Starknet application chains, with benefits including:

• Prevent congestion on the public Starknet, which can provide better throughput and user experience for its users;
• Lisks may be free to implement functions not supported by public chains, such as their own fee market logic;
• Starknet AppChain is the most scalable Rollup, with the option to configure various parameters including consensus, blockchain parameters and data availability.

Decentralization

The Starknet stack is quickly becoming the most decentralized L2 stack. The Starknet Foundation is committed to implementing this feature for Starknet.

Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, said that the decentralized stack makes the network more secure, resilient, transparent, and scalable, and there is no single point of failure, no dependence on a single entity, no “black box” and more builders .

A recent example of the decentralization of the Starknet Stack is the Madara Sequencer. Madara is based on Substrate and therefore relies on a decentralized consensus mechanism out of the box. The community development effort started in February 2023 45 community developers have generated over 740 commits and over 400 merged PRs to date.

In terms of building the stack that allows launching Starknet application chains, LambdaClass is building a Starknet Stack that will eventually include provers, sequencers, execution engines, and web browsers. Later, in the distant future, these various components can be integrated with other components of the Starknet stack and made into Starknet instances.

Ecology & Community

The goal of the Starknet ecosystem is to have multiple implementations of each component in the stack. The diagram below is an introduction to the different teams and the infrastructure they are developing:

In addition to the core components of the stack, some important supplementary components and services will also run Lisk, including:

• Blockchain browsers: browsers for Starkscan, ViewBlock, Voyager and LambdaClass (under development);
• Indexers: Abibara, Checkpoint, TokenFlow;
• API services: Alchemy, Infura;
• Bridges: LayerSwap, Orbiter, StarkGate;
• Deposit: Banxa, Ramp;
• Wallets: Argent, Braavos, Cartridge, and Metamask’s Snap (coming September 2023);
• Domain-specific application development framework: Dojo (games)

Next step

The Starknet stack is under development and will continue to evolve and improve over the next few years. Currently, the Starknet Lisk can be run as a managed service, operated by StarkWare. The first Starknet Lisk will soon launch a closed beta on mainnet.

Starknet said that it is expected that Starknet ecological development teams such as LambdaClass, Nethermind, and StarkWare, as well as Rollup-as-a-Service providers, will provide application chain hosting services.

Lisks will choose which stack components they run on their own as well as those that run through managed services such as StarkWare’s SHARP, possibly choosing to rely on strictly open source components or proprietary technology.

It is worth mentioning that Lisk is initially an L2 on Ethereum, but it will not exist for a long time. As early as 2021, StarkWare introduced the concept of L3. StarkWare believes that in order to achieve higher scale and lower transaction costs, the Starknet application chain will be migrated to L3 and will run on the L2 public Starknet.