zk-rollup – David Barreto

Four Challenges to StarkNet’s Success

23 June, 202222 June, 2022 by David Barreto

tl;dr

Vendor lock-in: difficulty moving away from StarkWare’s ecosystem
System centralization: the Sequencer and the Prover are operated by StarkWare
Steep learning curve: Cairo is hard to learn and the documentation has gaps
Upgradable smart contracts: StarkWare can make changes at any time

Starknet’s Architecture Review

14 August, 202321 June, 2022 by David Barreto

The architecture shown in this article has inaccuracies. Do not use it as a reference until updated (if ever). In the meantime, refer to the official Starknet docs.

tl;dr

Starknet’s user accounts (wallets) are implemented as smart contracts.
The system has 3 off-chain components (Sequencer, Prover and Full Nodes) and 2 on-chain (Verifier and Core).
The current system architecture is able to handle more transactions than Ethereum but with a higher delay for finality.
A dual checkpoint mechanism has been proposed to reduce time to finality without compromising cost.
An L2 transaction can be on any of these states: NOT_RECEIVED, RECEIVED, PENDING, ACCEPTED_ON_L2, ACCEPTED_ON_L1 or REJECTED.

The Three Paths for Smart Contract Scalability

25 November, 202216 June, 2022 by David Barreto

tl;dr;

A smart contract blockchain can scale with hardware, with an optimistic rollup or a zk-rollup
Solana’s hardware scaling solution suffers from lack of decentralization and sync issues
Optimistic rollups (Optimism) rely on off-chain verifiers and has a 6 days finality on L1
zk-rollups (StarkNet) submits and verifies validity proofs on-chain increasing security but also data usage of L1
Optimistic rollups are cheaper but zk-rollups are more secure