StarkWare’s zero-knowledge prover Stwo comes out of stealth

Stwo, StarkWare’s latest prover, is designed to significantly reduce latency and transaction costs

February 29, 2024 06:35 pm

StarkWare Chief Operating Officer Oren Katz | StarkWare modified by Blockworks

StarkWare, the company behind scaling solution Starknet, announced at Eth Denver today that it is building Stwo, a zero-knowledge prover designed to reduce latency and transaction costs.

This new prover will be built open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, Oren Katz, the chief operating officer at StarkWare, noted in a press release reviewed by Blockworks. This means that anyone will be able to fork the code, modify and distribute modified versions of the software.

“Stwo will bring new possibilities for scaling. And they’ll be available for everyone, given that it will be open source from day one,” Katz said.

In the context of blockchain technology, zero-knowledge provers refer to a computation entity responsible for determining whether or not given information is accurate without revealing its underlying data. These provers must create “proofs” that can then be verified by verifiers.

Stwo will not be the first open-sourced prover that StarkWare has developed. Currently, the public Starknet blockchain and Starknet app chains use its first-generation prover called Stone.

Katz notes that Stwo will be an evolution to the Stone prover thanks to the Circle Stark protocol that Starkware developed in partnership with Polygon.

According to StarkWare, Circle Stark protocol’s Circle STARK proofs increase the efficiency of existing STARKs. STARKS on Starknet are considered under the same classification as validity proofs on other zero-knowledge blockchains, which are used to attest to the validity of a specific state.

“Stwo is an evolution of the Stone prover because the Circle Stark protocol circumvents the constraints imposed by the classic STARK protocol. These constraints previously prevented STARK from being used efficiently for smaller fields,” Katz said.

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