StarkWare has announced the launch of Stwo, an open-sourced prover based on zero-knowledge (ZK) technology that aims to increase proving latency and reduce transaction fees for end users.
A prover is needed on Starknet to compress transactions by generating cryptographic proofs. By generating faster proofs, Stwo will reduce StarkWare’s processing costs, ultimately resulting in lower user fees, according to a Feb. 29 press release shared with Cointelegraph.
According to Oren Katz, the COO of StarkWare, the new Stwo will unlock new possibilities for the protocol. He said:
“Stwo will bring new possibilities for scaling. And they’ll be available for everyone, given that it will be open-source from Day 1.”
Anyone will be able to run the prover and its codebase, which is open-source for developers interested in implementing Stark-based systems. Over time, Starknet and Starknet app chains will automatically reap the benefits of Stwo, which will reduce latency and processing costs, ultimately leading to lower user fees.
“The prover is the magic wand of STARK technology. It plays a key role in scaling Ethereum,” said Katz. “The implementation of Circle STARK in Stwo will help supercharge Ethereum scaling by more efficiently generating proofs.”
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs) are cryptographic protocols enabling a user to prove specific information to another user without revealing the information itself.
StarkWare’s Starknet ZK-rollup is currently the fourth-largest layer 2, with a total value locked of $1.33 billion, according to L2Beat data. Starknet is the largest ZK rollup by TVL, followed by zkSync Era with a $868 million TVL.
The protocol said that the Starknet stack would eventually be fully open-sourced, in line with their vision for a decentralized, permissionless layer-2 blockchain network.
Interest in privacy-preserving technologies based on ZK-proofs has been growing. Animoca-backed Humanity Protocol launched a ZKP-powered biometric palm recognition technology for Web3 identity verification on Feb. 20. This was developed as a less intrusive biometric verification method to iris scans.
Humanity Protocol received funding from over 20 venture capitalist firms on Feb. 28, including companies like Hashed, CMCC, Cypher Capital, Foresight Ventures, and Mechanism Capital.
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