StarkWare has made an exciting announcement regarding the release of Stwo, a prover based on zero-knowledge (ZK) technology. This open-sourced prover aims to enhance proving latency and decrease transaction fees for users. In order to compress transactions and generate cryptographic proofs on Starknet, a prover is required. By generating faster proofs, Stwo will effectively reduce StarkWare’s processing costs, leading to lower user fees.
Oren Katz, the chief operating officer of StarkWare, believes that the introduction of Stwo will unlock new possibilities for the protocol. He stated that anyone will have the ability to run the prover and its codebase, which is open-source and available to developers interested in implementing Stark-based systems. As time goes on, both Starknet and Starknet app chains will automatically benefit from Stwo, resulting in reduced latency, processing costs, and ultimately lower user fees.
Katz emphasized the importance of the prover in STARK technology, stating that it plays a crucial role in scaling Ethereum. He believes that the implementation of Circle STARK in Stwo will greatly contribute to the efficient generation of proofs, ultimately supercharging Ethereum scaling.
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs) are cryptographic protocols that enable users to prove specific information to others without revealing the information itself. Currently, StarkWare’s Starknet ZK-rollup is the fourth-largest layer 2, with a total value locked of $1.33 billion, according to L2Beat data. Starknet is the largest ZK-rollup by total value locked, followed by zkSync Era with $868 million.
StarkWare plans to fully open-source the Starknet stack in the future, aligning with their vision of a decentralized, permissionless layer-2 blockchain network.
There has been a growing interest in privacy-preserving technologies based on ZK-proofs. Humanity Protocol, backed by Animoca, recently launched a ZK-powered biometric palm recognition technology for Web3 identity verification. This innovative method of biometric verification offers a less invasive alternative to iris scans.
On February 28, Humanity Protocol received funding from over 20 venture capitalist firms, including Hashed, CMCC, Cypher Capital, Foresight Ventures, and Mechanism Capital.
In related news, the US government recently moved $922 million of seized Bitcoin after the BTC price surpassed $60,000.