Layer-2 blockchain Starknet, known for its integration of zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography, is now enabling the launch of appchains. StarkWare, the primary developer behind Starknet, announced the news on Wednesday, revealing to CoinDesk that its "SN Stack" will allow developers to effortlessly create blockchains tailored to specific crypto use cases.
Back in July 2023, StarkWare initially announced the development of a customizable stack for developers to build their own blockchains. The announcement followed similar releases from several competitors of StarkWare—other layer-2 blockchains that enhance the capacity of Ethereum by providing users with side lanes for conducting transactions quickly and at a low cost.
StarkWare, which was founded in 2018, is among the first layer-2 scaling solutions to incorporate ZK cryptography, an encryption technique that has quickly become one of the core technologies underpinning many next-generation blockchains. Compared to "optimistic" layer-2 networks, which use the rollup technology employed by the majority of Ethereum scaling chains, ZK-based chains like StarkWare are considered more advanced and secure, despite being more difficult to construct, more costly, and harder to scale to generalized use cases.
“Starting today, projects will be able to build app-chains using the gold-standard ZK-STARK cryptography with the ease and low cost that has only been possible with optimistic rollups,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder and CEO of StarkWare, in a statement shared with CoinDesk.
The SN stack provides various options to cater to different types of developers. According to a press release shared with CoinDesk, “developers can choose between Madara, an open-source and modular framework built for flexibility, Dojo, optimized for gaming and on-chain applications, or the StarkWare Sequencer, which provides the full, high-performance infrastructure of public Starknet.”
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