StarkWare, a leading blockchain technology company, has recently unveiled Stwo, a new open-source prover that utilizes zero-knowledge (ZK) technology. The main objective of Stwo is to enhance proving latency and reduce transaction fees for end users.
In order to compress transactions on Starknet and generate cryptographic proofs, a prover is essential. By generating faster proofs, Stwo will effectively decrease StarkWare’s processing costs, resulting in lower fees for users. Oren Katz, the COO of StarkWare, believes that Stwo will bring about new possibilities for the protocol. He states that anyone will have the ability to run the prover and its codebase, as it is open-source and available for developers interested in implementing Stark-based systems.
Katz emphasizes the significance of the prover in scaling Ethereum, referring to it as the “magic wand” of STARK technology. The inclusion of Circle STARK in Stwo will greatly contribute to the scaling of Ethereum by generating proofs more efficiently.
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs) are cryptographic protocols that allow users to prove specific information to others without revealing the actual information itself. Currently, StarkWare’s Starknet ZK-rollup ranks as the fourth-largest layer 2, with a total value locked of $1.33 billion. Starknet is the largest ZK rollup in terms of total value locked, followed by zkSync Era with a TVL of $868 million.
StarkWare plans to fully open-source the Starknet stack in the future, aligning with their vision of a decentralized and permissionless layer-2 blockchain network.
The demand for privacy-preserving technologies based on ZK-proofs has been steadily increasing. Humanity Protocol, backed by Animoca, recently introduced a ZKP-powered biometric palm recognition technology for Web3 identity verification. This technology serves as a less intrusive method of biometric verification compared to iris scans.
Humanity Protocol received funding from more than 20 venture capitalist firms, including Hashed, CMCC, Cypher Capital, Foresight Ventures, and Mechanism Capital, further highlighting the growing interest in ZK-proofs and their applications.
In other news, the US government has transferred $922 million of seized Bitcoin after the price of BTC surpassed $60,000.