Tech
StarkWare scales Bitcoin with zero-knowledge technology, expanding STARK’s scaling from Ethereum
- Ethereum L2 developer StarkNet is bringing its talents to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
- The team plans to extend their protocol to support Bitcoin, allowing dApp developers to establish themselves on both the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains.
- This will improve Bitcoin’s scalability by thousands of degrees.
- The news comes as several controversial developments to improve the Bitcoin blockchain – most notably, the OP_CAT update – enter the community debate.
Bitcoin is evolving.
The historic cryptocurrency has spent much of the last decade as a store of value. Notably, blockchain lacked an ecosystem and was mostly detached from the world of decentralized finance – until now.
The advent of Ordinals (data recorded on BTC transactions) kicked off the BTC revolution. Now, the crypto community is anticipating that Bitcoin will become its own financial universefull of NFTs, scaling solutions and decentralized applications.
Related: The OP_CAT update could elevate Bitcoin beyond a simple store of value, adding new features
Bitcoin can express its potential and entrench itself in DeFi
Bitcoin is known for being one of the slowest blockchains around. The Mainnet, now 15 years old, can process around 7 transactions per second (TPS). This is very different from non-crypto gateways like Visa which can handle up to 60,000 TPS.
If Bitcoin is to become a thriving DeFi ecosystem, settlement times and scalability simply must improve. And the esteemed cryptocurrency developers StarkWare have stepped up.
StarkWare is best known in the community for its work with the Starknet Ethereum Layer 2 protocol, which uses zero-knowledge technology to improve transaction speed while maintaining security.
The team is turning its attention to the Bitcoin blockchain, thanks to the potential reimplementation of Satoshi’s dormant OP_CAT code. StarkWare founder Eli Ben-Sasson spoke about the issue:
Starknet will become the first network to simultaneously establish Bitcoin and Ethereum and scale Bitcoin to many thousands of transactions per second. This will happen within six months of Bitcoin’s potential upgrade, OP_CAT.
Essentially, the existing Starknet protocol branches its services to Bitcoin as well, avoiding the need for a fork. The ultimate goal is to transform blockchain into an all-powerful ecosystem, leveraging Bitcoin’s immense security and industry stature to take Web3 to the next level.
Bitcoin is powerful today, but it is still a fraction of what it can be. I want to see the complete works…[What] we are proposing to realize everything Satoshi envisioned, including the low-cost, everyday micropayments discussed in the Bitcoin White Paper.
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