Starknet, the Ethereum scaling protocol, has announced its plans to enhance throughput and reduce fees on its layer-2 rollup network through the introduction of parallel transaction functionality in 2024.
Following the successful implementation of Ethereum’s Dencun hard fork, Starknet released an updated roadmap on March 20. This upgrade introduced several Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), with EIP-4844 being the most significant one.
EIP-4844 revolutionized the way rollups add cheaper data to blocks by replacing call data for storage with blob space. Historically, using call data for storing cryptographic proofs of off-chain bundled transactions has been expensive due to the on-chain data processing requirements of all Ethereum nodes.
Starknet and other prominent Ethereum rollups quickly adopted the blob function after the implementation of Dencun. The network was one of the first to enable this feature on the same day as the hard fork, and shortly after, users experienced a significant drop in fees.
Thanks to Starknet’s EIP-4844 compatibility, transactions on the protocol now average $0.017 in fees per transaction. The team had previously reduced fees by approximately 25% with the release of Starknet v0.13.0 in early 2024, which also involved expanding the block size of its rollup protocol.
The next version update of Starknet, scheduled for the second quarter of 2024, will introduce transaction parallelization. This upgrade will enable the network to process multiple independent transactions concurrently, resulting in improved throughput and faster finality.
In addition, Starknet plans to further reduce fees with version 0.14.0, expected to be released by the end of 2024. This update will include three data availability-focused upgrades, including Volition, which allows decentralized applications to store data on Starknet instead of Ethereum’s base layer.
Another upgrade, application recursion, will enable developers to batch proofs of data storage from multiple Starknet blocks onto Ethereum, reducing costs and fee reductions for end-users.
Starknet is also developing data availability compression to reduce its data footprint on Ethereum. The protocol is exploring two different recursion methods to enable this functionality.
Overall, these updates and improvements demonstrate Starknet’s commitment to enhancing scalability and affordability on its layer-2 rollup network, making it a promising solution for Ethereum’s scaling challenges.