StarkWare, has announced the launch of Stwo, an open-source prover based on zero-knowledge technology aimed at increasing proof delays and reducing transaction fees for end-users. There was a need for a proof mechanism on Starknet to compress transactions by generating cryptographic proofs. According to a press release shared by the team on February 29, Stwo will produce faster proofs and reduce StarkWare’s transaction costs.
StarkWare’s Noteworthy Move
With this step, lower user fees on StarkWare will be addressed. According to StarkWare COO Oren Katz, the new Stwo will unlock new possibilities for the protocol. Katz shared the following statement on the matter:
“Stwo will bring new opportunities for scaling. And since it will be open-source from day one, it will be accessible to everyone.”
The open-source prover and codebase will be operable by everyone interested in implementing Stark-based systems. Over time, Starknet and Starknet application chains will automatically benefit from Stwo’s advantages, which will reduce delays and transaction costs, ultimately leading to lower user fees. Katz shared the following statement on this topic:
“The Prover, is the magic wand of STARK technology. Its implementation in Stwo will help strengthen Ethereum scaling by producing proofs more efficiently.”
ZK-Proof Technology and Blockchain
Zero-knowledge proofs stand out as cryptographic protocols that allow a user to prove certain information to another user without revealing the information itself. According to L2Beat data, StarkWare’s Starknet ZK-rollup is currently the fourth-largest Layer-2 ecosystem with a total locked value of $1.33 billion. Starknet is the largest ZK community in terms of TVL, followed by zkSync Era with a TVL of $868 million.
The protocol stated that in line with their vision of a decentralized, permissionless Layer-2 blockchain network, the Starknet ecosystem will eventually become fully open-source. Interest in privacy-protection technologies based on ZK-proofs is growing. On February 20, Animoca-backed Humanity Protocol launched a ZK-proof supported biometric palm recognition technology for Web3 identity verification. This was developed as a less intrusive biometric verification method compared to iris scans.
Humanity Protocol received funding from over 20 venture capital firms on February 28, including Hashed, CMCC, Cypher Capital, Foresight Ventures, and Mechanism Capital.
