With a $1 million research fund, StarkWare has revealed its ambitious aspirations to employ zero-knowledge (ZK) technology to deliver Bitcoin to a wider audience. With ZK technology, namely Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge (STARK) cryptography, the project aims to expand Ethereum and Bitcoin concurrently.
“We aren’t Ethereum maxis; we are scaling maxis.”
With this introduction, StarkWare hopes to carry out Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision by facilitating regular micropayments and developing a scalable system to facilitate international Bitcoin transactions.
In a press release shared with Cointelegraph, Eli Ben-Sasson, co-inventor of cheat-proof ZK encryption and CEO of StarkWare, stated that “Bitcoin today is mighty, but still a fraction of what it can be.”
“Crypto can clean up the digital world and finance. It can deliver integrity to money and rebalance power in our society, taking it away from Big Tech and restoring it to sovereign individuals […] therefore, we need a vision that showcases this. No such vision is complete without scaling the chain that started this great project.”
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson spoke about the impact of deploying STARK scaling on Bitcoin.
“It’s about mass scale, period. Those enthusiastic about Bitcoin already know that the BTC vision is so great that it needs to spread, and the chain should be in mass use […] It’s about enabling Bitcoin, with all its values intact and loyal to Satoshi’s vision.”
A technical proposal called OP_CAT is presently being considered by the Bitcoin community. Should it be accepted, it would allow for possible STARK scalability on the Bitcoin network. StarkWare, according to Ben-Sasson, is in favor of OP_CAT because they view it as “the safest path for Bitcoin to scale.”
Speaking with Cointelegraph speculatively about the OP_CAT proposal, Ben-Sasson said.
“[If it isn’t approved], there are some solutions we’re exploring to deliver STARK scale without OP_CAT; I don’t want to say much about them now, but they could provide the basis of a workaround.”
In response to a question in an interview on how soon the technology may be made available for testing and general usage in the event that OP_CAT is approved, Ben-Sasson said.
“Within six months of approval, quite possibly even quicker. Background — StarkWare got the very first L2, StarkEx, on Ethereum, and back then, it had sounded like science fiction.”
StarkWare’s most recent announcement comes after the company unveiled ZKThreads, a new scaling architecture.Louis Guthmann, head of product/market strategy at StarkWare, claims that the framework can let decentralized apps scale more easily and avoid money being stuck.This could eliminate the possibility of another FTX-Alameda catastrophe.