StarkWare announces new open source zero knowledge prover Stwo

On stage at ETHDenver in Colorado Thursday, blockchain software firm StarkWare — the developer behind Ethereum Layer-2 network Starknet — announced it is set to launch a new open-source zero knowledge prover called Stwo.

Currently under development, Stwo is an implementation of Circle STARKs, enabling “ultra-efficient” proving to reduce latency and processing costs. This should result in lower transaction fees and circumvent constraints in StarkWare’s existing prover, Stone, according to the StarkWare team.

“With great speed comes great possibility,” StarkWare COO Oren Katz said in a statement shared with The Block. “Stwo will bring new possibilities for scaling. And they’ll be available for everyone, given that it will be open-source from day one [under the Apache 2.0 permissive free software license].”

As the engine that powers Starknet’s tech stack, the prover is a system that can confirm transactions are valid without needing to share all the details on the main blockchain. It does this by creating a special kind of cryptographic proof to compress transactions.

“It’s especially exciting that just a week after the new Circle STARK protocol was announced as a theoretical breakthrough, this protocol is already springing to life with the development of this blazingly fast prover,” Katz said.

“The prover is the magic wand of STARK technology. It plays a key role in scaling Ethereum,” he added. “The implementation of Circle STARK in Stwo will help supercharge Ethereum scaling by more efficiently generating proofs.”

Developed in collaboration with cryptographers at Polygon Labs, Circle STARKs are a variant of the proofs widely used for Layer 2 scaling solutions, enabling Starknet to have faster finalization on both Layer 1 and Layer 2, according to the team.

Starknet was launched in alpha state on the Ethereum mainnet in November 2021. Since then, the StarkWare team has gradually open-sourced elements of the Starknet stack, including the Cairo 1.0 programming language, Papyrus client software and the Starknet sequencer (a component that orders and batches multiple off-chain transactions before submitting them to the Ethereum blockchain).

StarkWare previously open-sourced its existing Stone prover under the same license in August 2023 and eventually plans to fully open-source the Starknet stack.

Starknet token unlock criticism

The announcement comes just over a week after Starknet’s native token began trading on centralized exchanges and STRK -5.00% airdrop claims for the token’s distribution were opened on Feb. 20.

The initial distribution involved 728 million STRK, accounting for 7.28% of the 10 billion total supply. Some 1.297 million wallets were deemed eligible for this distribution, based on a November snapshot that looked at the volume of transactions and interactions on the network. This eligibility extended to members of the Protocol Guild, EIP authors, solo stakers, and open-source developers from outside the web3 space.

However, the broader distribution plan faced criticism from some because Starkware’s core contributors and investors were set to receive over 1.3 billion STRK, or 13% of the total supply, on April 15 — less than two months after the token’s launch.

On Feb. 20, StarkWare said it would be sticking to the plan, but just days later, it opted to change the release schedule following user feedback, dropping the portion of tokens initially unlocked from 13% to 0.64%, with a more gradual monthly unlock thereafter.