What is Starknet

Starknet is a decentralized layer-2 network that scales the Ethereum blockchain. It uses math and cryptography to bundle many transactions and submit them to Ethereum as a single transaction. It operates as a Validity-Rollup (or ZK-Rollup), producing STARK proofs off-chain and verifying them on-chain. STARK proofs are a type of zero-knowledge proof that can prove the validity of a computation without revealing any details about it.

Starkware is the developer behind Starknet. It is headquartered in Israel and founded by Eli Ben-Sasson, a Professor of Computer Science at Technion, and Uri Kolodny, a serial entrepreneur. StarkWare has raised at least $273 million in funding over six rounds from well-known investors like Paradigm, Sequoia, and Pantera. Their latest funding was raised on May 25, 2022, from a Series D round, which valued StarkWare at $8 billion.

Starknet does not natively support EVM. Cairo is the native programming language for Starknet. Some teams are developing transpilers to Cairo from Solidity and other programming languages. These transpilers will allow EVM contracts written in Solidity to be deployed on Starknet.

Starkware has announced that Starknet will have a native token. Starknet already deployed $STRK on the Ethereum mainnet on Nov. 16, 2022, with an initial circulating supply of ten billion. However, none of the tokens are tradable yet pending further notice.

According to the official release, $STRK has two main use cases. It can be used to pay transaction fees and be staked to participate in Starknet’s consensus mechanisms as a governance token.