Interview with StarkWare Prime Minister Gal Ron

Without a doubt, scaling Ethereum has been one of the hottest topics in recent months. The transition of the network to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm in September 2022 was a huge milestone in this regard, as it opened the door for the implementation of many different scaling solutions.

While Ethereum developers are working on ways to scale the network natively, the power of layer two solutions is only beginning to manifest.

Concepts like zero-knowledge proofs are now becoming an operational reality, but for many, they are still very strange ideas. Helping us understand more about the future of Ethereum’s scale is Gal Ron, product manager and blockchain researcher at StarkWare, a company primarily focused on exactly this.

The problem with Ethereum

Before we dive into some of the details, it’s important to understand what scaling Ethereum actually means. In simple terms, this is the process of expanding the processing capabilities of the network so that each of its nodes can handle higher transactional throughput.

There is a saying that a chain is only as strong and powerful as its weakest link. This is because only one of the links must break for the entire chain to fail. This also limits the strength of the chain because it can only handle a load that its weakest link is capable of handling, regardless of how strong all the other links are.

The same is true for Ethereum in its current state. The need for this comes from the fact that Ethereum has to satisfy the “trust” requirement.

Speaking on the matter, Ron explains:

To satisfy all trust assumptions and requirements, all nodes (on Ethereum) must do the same. By definition, this limits the performance of the system because if we increase the TPS or the block size above a certain threshold, we would start to prevent smaller nodes (read: with less computing power) from participating.

In essence, this makes Ethereum, by definition, restricted in capacity.

StarkWare Focus: What is a ZK test?

Ron explains that there are a couple of options to handle Ethereum throttling issues. One of them is to invent something else.

StarkWare, however, has taken a different approach of “scaling Ethereum from Ethereum and not creating another chain.” They do this through StarkNet and StarkEx, so let’s take a look.

StarkNet describes itself as a “permissionless decentralized validity rollup, also known as ZK-Rollup.” It works as an L2 (layer two) network on top of Ethereum, and its goal is to allow any decentralized application (dApp) to achieve unlimited scale for its computation. This is done without sacrificing the security and compatibility of the main layer, Ethereum, because StarkNet is based on the cryptographic proof system known as STARK.

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s start with the concept of zero-knowledge proofs.

“With Ethereum, all the nodes have to re-run all the transactions. Before ZK (zero knowledge), there was no other way to trust someone else to run the computations with integrity. If I’m a node on Ethereum, I see what other nodes report to me in terms of what the state of the system should be. There is no way for you to trust them other than re-running the same calculations they just ran.

The magic of ZK is that it creates a new paradigm of trust in other entities without having to rerun the calculations they just did.” Ron said.

In essence, ZK rollups like StarkNet greatly reduce the amount of computational work that nodes on Ethereum have to do, thereby increasing network performance.

All of this is done without sacrificing core layer security. To do so, StarkWare invented ZK-STARKs, which allow blockchains to move computations to a single off-chain STARK Prover and then verify the integrity of those computations using an on-chain STARK Verifier.

Gal Ron explained how both the Prover and Sequencer work, so for more details on that, check out the video above.

We also take a closer look at what exactly rollups are, what StarkEx is, and what StarkWare plans for the future.