Starknet is deploying a “bottleneck-busting” upgrade, which is expected to bring unprecedented TPS of “several hundred” to the Ethereum ecosystem.
The Ethereum network is congested, and scaling solutions including Starknet aim “to operate at high throughput in order to alleviate the traffic jam.”
Eli Ben-Sasson, President and co-founder of StarkWare, which initiated Starknet, said:
“Starknet’s new version, Quantum Leap, is exactly what the name suggests – a leap in TPS, the likes of which nobody yet achieved in the Ethereum ecosystem. STARK cryptography proves daily that it will fulfill Ethereum’s destiny as a mass-use chain. It’s passing battle-testing with flying colors. Just last week, the first scaling system we built, StarkEx, passed $1 trillion transacted. Now, we’re taking things to the next level. The droves of devs flocking to Starknet, and making it the creative hub of Web3, are getting access to the sky-high TPS that will make them succeed.”
Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, commented:
“We’re all familiar with throughput bottlenecks. Think airports. Last summer there was global travel chaos because of bottlenecks at check-in and security. Quantum Leap is the blockchain equivalent of a button that suddenly boosts the passenger throughput and turns our summer travel into a smooth and well-oiled operation. Crucially, with no compromise to security.”
The Quantum Leap upgrade – Starknet V12.0 – went live “on testnet on July 4, after months of engineering by StarkWare, LambdaClass, and others in the Starknet ecosystem.”
If approved by the Starknet community in a vote, “it will go live on Mainnet around July 13.”
The upgrade is expected “to propel Starknet to the top of the charts for TPS on L2 Beat, which is a go-to analytics site for Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions.”
Time-to-inclusion, which is “a measure of latency, is also expected to be under 15 seconds in normal conditions, which is on par with Ethereum.” The community should “expect to see continued improvements in TPS and latency throughout the third quarter.”
The combination of more throughput and faster inclusion “means Quantum Leap will pave the way for faster DeFi applications, the creation of realistic triple A games and the availability of more consumer services on a Web3 technology stack.”
High TPS and low latency are key to Starknet’s ultimate goal of creating an “invisible” blockchain where Web3 tech simply works “with the speed, performance and functions that we’ve all come to expect from Web2.”
Uri Kolodny, StarkWare CEO and co-founder, said:
“Developers are at the heart of both Starknet and this most recent upgrade. Quantum Leap is all about freeing developers from the bounds of computation that they’re so accustomed to in the Ethereum ecosystem today. By improving transaction speed and reducing latency, Starknet is making it even easier for developers to build the next killer apps on Web3 rails.”
Starknet is a decentralized Layer 2 network “that enables Ethereum to scale. It operates as a Validity roll-up, also known as Zero Knowledge (ZK) roll-up, which bundles many transactions together and then rolls them into a single transaction in Ethereum.”
StarkWare is the five-year-old company “that pioneered the STARK proof, a groundbreaking cryptographic system accessible through the Cairo programming language.”
A number of changes have been “included in the upgrade to make the network more developer-friendly, including significant accelerations in the sequencer, which benefited greatly from a year-long involvement by LambdaClass.”
In the Web2 world, high TPS is “taken for granted.”
For example, the payment provider Visa processes a”round 1,700 transactions per second on average and in theory can process up to 65,000 transaction messages per second via centralized systems.” For decentralized blockchains to “challenge these incumbent players, high TPS needs to be ingrained in the ecosystem.”
Starknet has been “making strides in different areas of its blockchain technology and they are now all coming together to empower developers to create killer applications.”
Stunning cost savings are on the agenda for the Version 13 upgrade, which, when paired with the gains from Version 12, “will make Starknet the perfect home “for Web3 applications for mass adoption.”
Version 14 will then enable developers to pay an extra fee to prioritize transactions – akin to priority boarding at the airport – which will help the network handle congestion.”
The ramp-up in scale also “comes just ahead of Herodotus’ deployment of Storage Proofs, which is a groundbreaking development that could offer an alternative to cross-chain bridges.”
There’s also “increased excitement building around the power of Account Abstraction, a blockchain design feature that’s been baked into Starknet since day one.”