Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution StarkWare announced plans to open source its proprietary Starknet Prover under the Apache 2.0 license, which has processed 327 million transactions and minted 95 million nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to date.
The prover is the crucial engine Starkware uses to roll up hundreds of thousands of transactions and compress them into a tiny cryptographic proof written on the Ethereum blockchain.
“We think of the Prover as the magic wand of Stark technology. It wondrously generates the proofs that allow unimaginable scaling,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of Starkware.
Starkware has faced criticism from the crypto community and competing solutions such as ZK Sync and Polygon for holding onto the IP behind its tech, which contradicts blockchain’s open source and interoperable ethics.
Making the prover open source under the Apache 2.0 license will enable any other project or network — or even games or database developers — to make use of the technology, edit the code and customize it. The tech was released in 2020 and is already being used by ImmutableX, Sorare and dYdX.
Avihu Levy, Starkware’s head of product, was reluctant to commit to a time frame…
