Starknet community governance gives thumbs up to Starknet Alpha upgrade

The green light implies that airdrop of STRK tokens, which are currently non-transferrable, may be imminent

article-image

Starknet and Adobe Stock modified by Blockworks

share

The community that governs Starknet has overwhelmingly voted to implement the latest version of Starknet Alpha v0.13.0.

Poll results show that over 99.8% of voters supported the proposal, which will launch Starknet’s third official protocol upgrade on mainnet on Jan 10.

Previous versions of Starknet Alpha v0.13.0 were deployed on the Goerli testnet and Sepolia testnet in early December.

Starknet is a prominent Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution based on zero-knowledge cryptography. It uses zk-STARKs to prove the validity and integrity of computations on Ethereum. 

The team raised a $100 million series D in May 2022, led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue. It currently has a TVL of $145 million and a monthly transaction volume of $4.96 million, according to information available on L2Beat.

This latest version of the protocol will set the scene for a new transaction version, one that enables fees to be paid in STRK or ETH. It will also enable reduced transaction fees, Eli Ben-Sasson, the co-founder and president of StarkWare, the infrastructure team behind Starknet, told Blockworks.

“Starknet token will not be noticed at first; wallets are still integrating it and there’s a lot of other infrastructure work that needs to be finalized, but at some point, when the token is transferable, users will be able to pay fees not just in ETH but also in STRK,” he said.

STRK is not yet publicly available for purchase or trading, but community members speculate that an airdrop is imminent. 

Loading Tweet..

The Starknet Foundation plans to distribute 1.8 billion STRK tokens to various teams that are building and driving adoption on its blockchain network. 

Read More: Starknet Foundation teases STRK token airdrop

“Even though STRK itself is not transferable, [this upgrade] will allow it to do so from a technical point of view, so that when it turns on at a later point in time the infrastructure is ready,” Ben-Sasson said. 

Ben-Sasson explains that because of the reliance on Ethereum for data availability, transaction fees on Starknet today remain relatively quite high, averaging around $0.39, according to Starkscan

Immediately following the mainnet upgrade, transaction costs will be reduced by between 25% to 50%, Ben-Sasson said.

“That is not the end of cost reduction. Very soon, EIP-4844 is going to be turned on, on Ethereum. That will dramatically reduce cost even more because data availability costs will be going down,” he said.

Read More: Ethereum’s Next Upgrade To Focus on Blobs

On top of this, Ben-Sasson notes that in the near future, there are plans to introduce a fee-congestion market for when capacity is outpaced by demand.


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the On the Margin newsletter.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

    Upcoming Events

    Salt Lake City, UT

    MON - TUES, OCT. 7 - 8, 2024

    Blockworks and Bankless in collaboration with buidlbox are excited to announce the second installment of the Permissionless Hackathon – taking place October 7-8 in Salt Lake City, Utah. We’ve partnered with buidlbox to bring together the brightest minds in crypto for […]

    Salt Lake City, UT

    WED - FRI, OCTOBER 9 - 11, 2024

    Pack your bags, anon — we’re heading west! Join us in the beautiful Salt Lake City for the third installment of Permissionless. Come for the alpha, stay for the fresh air. Permissionless III promises unforgettable panels, killer networking opportunities, and mountains […]

    recent research

    Polygon Call Template (2).png

    Research

    A significant portion of the call was dedicated to discussing the proposed ZK-PoS Phase 1, which aims to connect Polygon PoS to the AggLayer using a ZK proof of consensus, in addition to a pessimistic proof. This upgrade is intended to generalize how chains settle while protecting chain health and asset integrity. The implementation will involve deploying new contracts for the LxLy unified bridge for token mapping and migrating existing tokens from the PoS portal to the new deployment.

    article-image

    It may be counterintuitive that a high amount of focus on a technology would lead to security risks — but it’s true

    article-image

    Structured products are common in traditional finance, but onchain options are scant

    article-image

    Plus, an update on the ether ETF front and an overview of this week’s economic calendar

    article-image

    Plus, Solana fell roughly 12% on the week, and for some memecoins the drawdown was even more aggressive

    article-image

    Mark Wong is currently seeing some profit-taking from early bitcoin adopters, but he also sees buying interest from institutions

    article-image

    Bitcoin has been in a bull market for 19 months. If March wasn’t the top, that is.