Bankless - Super Scaling with StarkWare | Uri Kolodny & Eli Ben-Sasson

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

Ethereum is scaling. With a recent $50 million raise at a valuation of $2 billion, StarkWare is pioneering zkRollups across the Ethereum ecosystem. As it powers dYdX, arguably the most liquid market in the world, StarkWare is continuing to move into new territory, with StarkNet imminently deploying on Ethereum Mainnet. The goal of StarkWare is simple: 'bring massive scalability to Ethereum while preserving L1 security, permissionless interactions, and decentralization.' The ecosystem is growing at an astounding rate, so tune in as core members Uri Kolodny and Eli Ben-Sasson walk us through how StarkWare is bringing Super Scaling to Ethereum. ------ 📣 OPOLIS | YOUR CRYPTO CAREER https://bankless.cc/Opolis  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix  ------ TOPICS COVERED: 0:00 Intro 5:00 Eli and Uri of StarkWare 9:02 StarkEx vs StarkNet 16:37 StarkEx is Scaling Today 24:35 Latency & Data Tradeoffs 32:50 Scaling with Math & Cryptography 38:21 StarkEx to StarkNet 43:35 Ahead of Schedule 47:56 StarkNet Launch 54:48 StarkWare Roadmap 1:00:40 Modular & Privacy 1:04:39 Business Model 1:11:33 Values & Code 1:16:15 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES: Uri on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ukolodny?s=20  Eli on Twitter: https://twitter.com/EliBenSasson?s=20  StarkWare on Twitter: https://twitter.com/StarkWareLtd?s=20  StarkWare Discord: https://discord.gg/uJ9HZTUk2Y  StarkNet Alpha: https://medium.com/starkware/starknet-alpha-is-coming-to-mainnet-b825829eaf32  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, it is time for another state of the nation. Super excited about today's episode. This is super scaling with Starkware. We have the two Starkware co-founders on. We have Ellie and Yuri of Starkware. We're going to get to that conversation in just a minute. But David, this is the time to bring on Starkware. I mean, this is ZK roll-ups. Roll-ups in general are starting to really take off, I think, in a big way. Starkware is rolling out some crucial tech. Why is now the to have Starkware on to tell us about the scalability strategy for Ethereum and blockchains in general. Yeah, I recently tweeted out that layer two is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. And some components about Ethereum are super scalable. D-Y-D-X is doing

more volume than Coinbase. Immutable. It just released its a gaming-powered, gaming-focused NFT platform, and it's already like throwing out the transaction throughputs. The scalability that we all want to see on Ethereum is being built in these different corners. Yet that is the first version of Starkware's product, StarkX. StarkNet is also coming soon. All of these conversations are happening all at once. And definitely in the moment of where like crypto Twitter just absolutely blew up over Ethereum scalability, it's a fantastic time to bring on Starkware to talk about how scalable ZK rollups can actually be when put on top of a decentralized permissionless settlement layer that is Ethereum. Yeah, I feel like the knowledge isn't evenly distributed either, right? It's like we're

doing our part. But a lot of this technology is hard to understand. And so part of what bank was trying to do is break this down into mental models. We put together the modular blockchain podcast. You wrote an article about that, David, would refer listeners to that if you want to get a high level overview. But we're now on a journey towards like unpacking these ZK scalability type solutions. And StarCware is definitely one of the leading ones, one of the ones we are most excited about in the space. So it's going to be a fascinating conversation. Stay tuned to for that. Also, some quick announcements. We dropped a podcast with Visa. Visa is going all in on crypto in the crypto space. Other fintechs are following.

That was an episode we just dropped on Monday. David, any sneak peek on that app? Not only Visa, but also Anchorage, which is really the emblem of the defy mullet. You got Visa in the front. You got Anchorage in the back. What is it like to completely redefine what it means to have fintech. FinTech, fintech based on crypto rails, not central banking rail. So all of that and more in the podcast that came out yesterday on bankless. There you go. Defy Mullet thesis, right? So the mental models just keep flowing out of bankless guys. This is a crucial stuff for you. Also, we need to give a shout out to Oplas. They're doing some cool stuff these days. They're sponsoring this message. I tell you, David, I haven't, I've heard this so often.

like somebody telling me, I'd quit my corporate job, my boring corporate job in a heartbeat, but I can't because I'd lose my health care. This is, of course, in the U.S., I know other countries don't have these problems, but this is how they keep you a wage slave. This is how they keep you a member of the corporations, right? You might want to go where your heart is, go towards a Dow, go where the opportunity is, but you lose benefits. Opolis is an organization that services Dow's that helps solve this.

They do payroll, and they do benefits. for DAOs and for self-sovereign workers. We think the future is moving from the gig economy to the ownership economy towards self-sovereign workers, and OPLUS provides benefits for those. Anything else you want to say about OPLIS, David? Yeah, this is really the infrastructure that we need to go fully sovereign. And not only when you sign up for OPLIS can you start to have health care with your other Dow workers, right? These are all the same health care. OPLIS is like a co-op. You guys all get to like choose your healthcare together. We all get to be insured together and also rates go

down as the organization grows up gets larger. But if you sign up for Opelis, you get a thousand work tokens and a thousand bank tokens if you sign up by the end of this year. And so the work tokens is the tokens of the Opelus network. Again, it's just just like every other Dow, if you use it, you become an owner in it. And so Opelis, making sure that all of the infrastructure needed to be workers in the Dow decentralized world are there so that we can actually sustain this ecosystem going forward. Guys, there's a link in the show notes. If you want to get plugged into that, banklist.cc.cc.

C.OPLUS. David, I want to start with the question I ask you in every state of the nation. What is the state of the nation today, sir? I've done this one before, but I'm doing it again. Today, we are building. And the Starkware team has been super hard at work, building out ZK tech for everyone on Ethereum to use. as we go through a weekend of drama and fud,

the only answer to really any of that shenanigans is to just keep on building. And that is exactly what we are doing here on the state of the nation. We are building today. I want to find out from the Starkware team if they are abandoning Ethereum. My guess is their answer is no,

but we will get into that in just a minute before we do. We want to take the sponsors that made this episode possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DFI. And now it's live. with over a hundred projects deployed.

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all in one space guys we are back with the starkware team pleased to introduce you to ellie from We're co-founder of Starkware, also Yuri, co-founder of Starkware. Gentlemen, great to have you on Bankless. How are you doing today? Hi, guys. Thanks for having us. Well, we are super excited to dig into everything that Starkware is doing in this space. And we're excited because this is really kind of the scalability answer, I think, to crypto and to blockchains. And you guys are really delivering it and ramping up the delivery of it.

delivery of it. So we're going to talk about Stark X, StarkNet, everything that you're delivering. But first, we want to congratulate you on this massive Series C fundraise. So it's a $50 million fund raise, a $2 billion valuation. Congrats on that. How does it feel to be on the other side of this fundraise? Well, it's, you know, it's, the series C was done with Sequoia. They've been our investors and close collaborators since our Series A going back to 2018. So we've known Mike and the Sequoia team well. And that made for a very simple and easy process. So regardless, we're happy to have this sort of milestone behind us.

I want to say that it's better to be on this side than on the side for that. Of course, of course. You guys, there are so many different things that we want to dive into with everything with Starkware. But first, you guys have a lot of things that are named. Stark something. At the start of this podcast, we want to go in and actually label and define these things because we're going to be referring to them more and more throughout the rest of the podcast.

So there's Starkware, there's Stark X, there's StarkNet. Can you guys define and delineate between these three things for us? Sure. So first of all, Starx were co-invented by two of my co-founders. Michael Reaptiv, who's our chief architect, and got his PhD under LE before co-founding Starkware with us and with Alessandro Kiaz. So they're co-inventors of Stark's. That's the zero knowledge protocol that we're using in our software stock. Stark X was our first product, and this is a permission, a standalone, customizable scaling engine that runs over Ethereum.

And this powers immutable X and SurRare and D-YDX and D-YDX and Diversify and Sooner. power seller as well. And StarkNet is our permissionless decentralized ZK roll-up. And the Alpha has been live on a public test net since mid-June and is going live on Mainnet Ethereum before the end of this month. So just to reiterate that, StarkX are these multiple scaling chains that are app-specific, right? So D-Y-D-X is using an app-specific Z-K technology platform, which we call StarkX.

And also diversify is also using this, and So-Rare is also using this and immutable. But then StarkNet is maybe a little bit more what users might be familiar with when they come to, like, optimism or arbitram one, where there's one canonical chain that is permissionless to build on and everyone can build on that. that is not let yet live, but has been in Alpha since early June. And maybe we have some announcements coming soon about its release date, maybe. Is all of that correct? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So as I mentioned, it's been on a public test since mid-June. It's coming to a main it, Ethereum, before the end of this month. I should just, just one minor correction. The Stark X instances are not changed. They are essentially applications, scaling services, powered by the Starkeyx Cloud Service running over Ethereum. Okay, let's unpack that a little bit.

They're not a blockchain. So where does it, how does it, why is it not a blockchain, where the differences lie, and how does it actually achieve scale? Elie, did you want to? Yeah, okay. So I think what defines a blockchain, I mean, there are several things. It's not, there's no formal definition.

but it's very permissionless. Everyone can come submit transactions, and it's something that basically the public sort of runs and uses. And StarKex is, as you said, the line of products that each one of them is sort of a backend that services one particular customer, that is another business that is customer-facing.

D-Y-D-X, it's an exchange that faces customers, and it uses a technology stack that is StarkX. It basically uses the Z-K-Stark technology in order to compress computation and achieve computational integrity without any trust, but for trust in math and trust in the blockchain. So it's sort of an interface and a settlement layer that's very specific to a customer. That's Stark-X. So I think it would be a stretch to call it a blockchain. It is more an interface and a settlement layer and sort of something that boosts up the capacity of some other blockchain.

And in all these cases, it's Ethereum. A compression service, if you will. All right. Okay, a compression service, right. So you guys talked about, so the word cloud, who is actually operating the compression service? Is that you guys? Yes. For Starkey, it is.

Correct. For Starknet, it will eventually be a fully decentralized. network or anyone could function as a sequencer and prover on the network. Hopefully, including you and Ryan. So StarkX is, StarkX is this technology that you guys have in your guys' own cloud that you guys run and you guys allow people like DYDX or So Rare or Immutable to tap into that service. Yes. And then StarkNet is that same sort of service, but more, um,

streamlined and just made more available for everyone. And rather than have it being on one single cloud, is Stark net an actual blockchain? It's closer to it. And there's another distinction. So Stark X is sort of crafted towards a very small number of special purpose use cases that are extremely important. For instance, dealing with a massive amount of payments,

very high TPS, like for a payment processor. Another example is a massive. amount of trades or perpetual swaps and positions or minting of NFTs. So it caters to things where you have very high demand but for very specific functionalities. Now, Star Connect, in addition to being permissionless, it is also a platform that is cheering complete and universal, very much like Ethereum. So it means that instead of us saying, okay, you can either, you know, you can do one of four or five things that our customers really want, like, you know, minting, trading, transferring, blah, blah, blah.

Basically, it says, okay, anyone can write any kind of logic for any purpose they want. It could be generative art. It could be, you know, compressing many votes. It could be some game design. It could be a whole number of things that we don't actually know what they are. We basically, you know, invented and then designed and offered tooling for writing any smart contract, deploying it, submitting transactions. to it. So instead of limited functionality for these things that are in high demand, it is this general purpose framework. So it's closer to a blockchain. It's not quite a blockchain because

it's a layer two, right? So I think blockchains are more layer one. So just like optimism and arbitrum, I don't think they're described as blockchains. They are layer two. We are also a proud layer two. I wanted to add to that a very important feature that Starkniz has had for a while. and we'll have on Maynit by the end of this month is composability. And this is something that a lot of DAP developers care deeply for. This allows for this money Lego or NFT Lego or Smart Contract Lego to thrive and have this amazingly accelerated and open development framework that developers enjoy so much.

This is super cool. And I'm surprised as we're going through these names that Tony Stark, you know, wasn't involved somehow because this is super advanced tech. But I'm sure you get that joke all the time. Can we talk a little bit about the Stark X first? Because I want to just cover that. Scalability now, really, with Starkware is kind of the conversation. Then I definitely want to spend the bulk of the conversation talking about StarkNet,

because that is the next thing that is coming. As you said, you're releasing to MayNet at the end of this month. So we're close to the end of this month. We are breathless with anticipation here. But let's talk about Stark X first. there is this impression in the space. And we just saw it last weekend. Literally last weekend.

I don't know if you guys, you know, hang out on Twitter at all. But the Twitter world was a buzz with this idea that Ethereum is not scaling today. That there is no scalability on Ethereum today, hence the need for all of these other alternative layer one solutions. And, you know, there was a lot of things I wanted to say. But one of the things I wanted to say was, of course it's scaling today, right? Look at what Stark X is doing. Look at what DYDX is doing. Look at what Diversify is doing. Look at what So Rare is doing, immutable X, scaling using this compression layer, this layer two on Ethereum today. Now, app specific for now, but later, this can be more generalized in something like a Stark net. But can you talk about that a little bit? Because I don't think people understand or appreciate the numbers here. And what's actually being done across, say, these four the big four Stark X applications today. D-Y-D-X diversify so rare and mutable.

Do you guys have any numbers here or any sort of metrics on what's happening, how this is scaling so far? Yuri, why don't you start? Sure. You know, D-Y-D-X would be, I think, one sort of remarkable case study that we could point to. The transactions that D-YDX used to do on layer one, each transaction proposing of two trades, a couple of markets only, those were around 250,000 gas, maybe 280,000 gas per transaction.

The transactions they're doing today on StarkX touch many more assets. They have the ability, now you can put up collateral against many more positions. And so it's a far more complicated transaction. We estimate that equivalent transaction on layer one to, it will have consumed about 600,000 gas per transaction. Those transactions today in production on Starkeyx consume sub 500 gas, not 500,000 gas, sub 500 gas per transaction. Wow. Now, we're talking about this, this isn't a demo and this isn't like a nice sort of case study that we ran for an hour and that brought down. This is day and day out, the past 24 hours were at 10 billion, I believe. Trading volume for the YDX at the end of another one of their fabulous epochs.

Cumulative to date over 230 billion BES and boy, dollar settled on Ethereum. Stark X in total over 55 million transactions, DYDX is probably around half that in total. So a very, very dramatic scaling today already on Ethereum. Our estimate, at 600,000 gas, that's about 300,000 gas per trade. That's roughly 3 TPS would have consumed all of Ethereum's layer 1 capacity. Okay.

We're doing on a very regular basis 15 times that on Starkex. Yeah. Yeah, this is just to show what we're talking about. So this is the TPS, the effective TPS that we're seeing, I hope you see my screen share. This is the effective TPS over the past 24 hours. So you see it's like on average, I'd say on the DYDX system. So this is like I'd say on average, a TPS of 7 with peaks at, you know, 13 TPS. And again, as we just mentioned, the effective TPS, if all of the theory of

would have been consumed for just settling these trades, Ethereum wouldn't be able to settle this many. It can handle the TPS of, I guess, one. Yeah. So, I mean, at its peak, basically, DYDX is another Ethereum. Right. Oh, it's multiple, it's multiple Ethereum. Wow.

Wow. That's just one. So that's just one of our systems. And it's consuming on a regular basis, you know, over the past 24 hours, we haven't looked the numbers, but it's going to be less than 1% of Ethereum's gas while doing something like 5 to 10, sorry, 5x or whatever, 2 to 5x, the capacity of all of Ethereum and consuming 1% of the gas. Yes. And I want to get to so rare and immutable in a second, too.

It's like, but what we just said, I mean, that is scalability, right? This is why I feel like there's such a narrative mismatch in the market and in crypto Twitter these days. And it's a very bizarre world we're in right now. Just to recap, there are multiple Ethereums, perhaps two to five Ethereum's worth of capacity that is being settled on Ethereum by DYDX, and what you guys said is less than 1% of Ethereum's capacity. So two to five Ethereum is being compressed down to just 1% of Ethereum's capacity. On one of our systems.

On one of our systems, but I want to emphasize that we're not supporting two to five because that's what we can support. We're supporting two to five because that's the demand. Right, right. We can support substantially, substantially more, multiples of that easily today. And so when I said that scale that would probably be another, I don't know how many, but like another five to ten Ethereum's. You know, we rented, I forgot how many million NFTs over the past half year.

Probably again, that would have consumed. I think about 25 million NFTs. Wait, right. Is this, are we talking about? about so rare or immutable now or both of them both of them cross both of them okay give us those stats again so we don't miss them about about i think 24 25 million nfts minted to date wow take a few million here that's a few million so we're not one's the start of this show when i said that at the beginning of the show that scalability's here is just not evenly distributed yet this is

what i'm talking about d ydx hyper scalability it's just uh people are expecting like this thing to be happening like everywhere equally across the board, but no, that we are getting hyper-scalability at like, you know, sub-one penny transactions in very specific examples. Applications. Yeah. Applications. Yeah. And these are what Stark X is bringing.

I want to stress this. These are production systems. So both Surveh and Immutable are working in Validium mode where they chose to have an off-chain data solution, StarkX employed as an off-chain data solution. because they wanted reasonable gas cost per mint. We are minting batches of 600,000 NFTs at sub 10 gas per mint. Once again, 10 gas, not 10,000 gas. Wow, that's incredible.

Yeah, and I think bankless listeners will be familiar with what a volidium is because we've talked about that. We did an episode on modular blockchains. It kind of talked about and touched on all of these differences. But it's basically modular blockchain, and if you kind of break it up consensus data and then execution, right? You're talking about a volidium uses not Ethereum for its data layer, uses Ethereum for its consensus layer, but it uses something else for its data layer.

In a volition, of course, is when a chain kind of has the choice, an application has the choice. I want to ask about this, because this is a question. Incredible extreme scalability, super scalability, as we said, is happening right now, Are there any tradeoffs here? Refresh us on this. We're still camping on Stark X right now. But what are the tradeoffs here with Stark X from a decentralization perspective, Ellie? What would you say?

Yeah, there are actually many, many tradeoffs that are behind the scenes. I'll just mention a few of them. So if you want latency to be smaller, meaning so what would entail? So right now we're basically taking a very large number of transactions. and you need a very long time for them to accumulate. And then you're producing one single proof for that. So you need also a lot of computation to get that thing. So what you get is you're increasing latency, which is bad,

but you're decreasing and minimizing amortized gas cost per transaction. Because the larger the batch, that's basically what the magic of Starks give you. The larger the batch, the lower the amortized cost per transaction will be. Okay, so one very clear trade-off is that as we grow the batch sizes, all things considered, latency grows, but amortized gas cost goes down. Another thing is that as you, yeah, I think that's probably the most important trade-off. There are other internal trade-offs in our system. For instance, if you kept the same batch size and latency and everything, but you actually wanted the on-chain proof to be smaller,

you would pay with off-chain computation because there are various mathematical parameters you can play with there. And that's another trade-off that we have at our disposal, you know, buy a bigger machine, have even more latency, and even for a fixed batch size, you can decrease that. There's an obvious trade-off in the context of data availability. If you want to operate in roll-up mode, your data is on-chain. It is no doubt more secure.

It is no doubt more expensive. The beauty of the Volition solution, which is coming online in a matter of weeks, is that this decision will be handed off from the app to the user. And so the user can decide on a transaction by transaction basis if they care enough for security to pay that premium of on chain data. Will it literally just be like a drop-down menu where it says, here's my transaction, I want it stored on-chain or I want it stored off-chain. It'll be just that simple. And here are the costs. Right.

And it'll have two different costs associated with that. Yeah. That's pretty fantastic. Indeed. Ellie, can we go over that latency trade-off again? So it's like I kind of understand that. but like what is the tradeoff that an individual user is making with latency, right? It's like if I have, if there's higher latency, how does that affect the, I guess,

security position for an individual user? Does that just mean things get settled to Ethereum less frequently? So there's a longer window of time where they're potentially vulnerable? That's a terrific question. So currently on Stark X, this is very much abstracted away. and the risk of this window is taken by our customers, you know, D-YDX, diversify, mutable, and so on. Now, what does it mean?

It means that you as a user, and I'm assuming that many of your listeners have used some of these systems, the YDX, so they probably notice that they have instant finality and even if they want to basically go, you know, retrieve all their funds on-chain, they get it very, very quickly. Now, this does not mean that the relevant stark proofs happen with the same finality. But what is happening is something like this. D-Y-D-X, which gets these orders and settles them and matches them and calculates the positions,

knows that once it settles something or did something, it basically now goes into this stack or queue, which is controlled by D-Y-D-X. and, you know, it will take some time for a batch to reach enough size for it to be convenient to put in a proof and then for the proof to be generated and accepted on-chain. And currently, for D-Y-D-X, for instance, with its very large proofs, this is a number of hours. But the user doesn't experience any of that. What's happening is that D-Y-D-X is essentially assuming whatever risks are associated with that. and I think they made a wise choice.

The risks are relatively small because they know that something that has been settled will appear in a proof and that a proof will be accepted on chain and basically they know what the next state of the... So it's a little bit like I think in traditional trading, a lot of settlement is T plus 3, but a lot of exchanges will sort of assume the risk for three days

with a case of VIDX and other customers. it's a small number of hours. And again, it's in their control. For instance, DYDX could decide that it wants to close a batch every whatever, two minutes. And then the proof would probably be much quicker to generate and would go on-chain much quicker. So maybe the latency from DYDX's side would not be hours but minutes.

But then the cost would be that the amortized gas cost per transaction would be higher because the amortization is over a smaller number. So most of our customers have chosen to basically crank the knob to maximum batch size, minimal amortized gas cost, but also maximal latency, which is a wise choice, which I think. But when a bunch of more users come and deploy more transactions at a higher rate, you guys can actually increase the rate at which these settled to Ethereum without also increasing the per user gas costs.

Is that correct? For sure. And we can do that thanks to a remarkable technology called Sharp, which stands for Shared Prover. And this is a technology that's in production today serving at the moment, so rare and immutable and diversify. And hopefully, D-Y-D-X will be added soon to this system. And Sharp basically relies on the fact that all of these systems run on Cairo are a zero-knowledge-proof programming language. And a chiro program can describe any logic, any application logic that one wants to implement. It can also implement a sequence of application logic.

And that sequence can be a mutable's logic, followed by Cerer's logic, followed by diversifies, and so on and so forth. So you can bundle all these transactions and all these completely disparate applications into a single proof. Okay. And now this proof can be verified once on Ethereum, meaning all these applications can amortize their gas verification costs across sort of the Cairo ecosystem. Now imagine if Ryan is launching a new game, okay, and it has just a few users. He's just started out, not terribly sort of big yet. From day one, he's benefiting from the marginal cost of the entire Cairo ecosystem, the entire Sharp ecosystem. So that that is a huge cost saver for low bandwidth applications.

That's fascinating because that creates such a virtuous cycle because now here I am with my small game here. And like I'm incented to bring David's game in too because I want him to share in the costs of the whole thing. And it also breeds some network effects too, I would assume, where everyone wants to kind of camp out in the same location to spread these costs. We would assume for sure. Yeah. Yeah, so, okay, can I just zoom out for a minute? Because I feel like part of the narrative around the theorem, not scaling these other things is like,

let's talk a little bit about your approach to scalability, because I think this is fundamental for people to understand. It's very math-heavy, okay? We called this a compression technology. And we did an episode with Justin Drake called MoonMath Cryptography. And basically the whole thesis of the episode, episode was, hey, these blockchains are trust machines. And the way to scale them up to get a, you know, a giant leap from one generation of the computer to the next is actually, it's not

just creating bigger blocks and, you know, bigger block sizes. It's actually cryptography. That's the technology that scales these trust machines, right? And so to me, it seems like, you know, stark and zero knowledge, this is a big advance in terms of cryptography. technology and the key to all of these unlocks that you're talking about. So not asking you to get into the moon math or the specifics, that would be probably definitely beyond David and I and beyond many in the audience. But can you just talk about this philosophy? Because this is a different path to scalability than I think we're seeing with a lot of alternative chains, which are increasing blockchain size, like creating more complexity and difficulty in running validators.

you guys are scaling with math and cryptography. Can you talk about that for a minute? Ellie, what would you say about that? Yeah, so I completely agree with Justin that blockchains are about being a trust machine. And I would add to that the reason we trust them currently is that everyone and anyone can be participate in validating that all transactions are good. And they can do so using very simple off-the-shelf computational means. So here's a bad way to scale.

What if we just 10x, whatever, the gas limit of a block on Ethereum or increase the block size on Bitcoin? So what would happen is that there are machines that could process 10x more, but it's probably not going to be my laptop, the one that I'm using to talk to you. And very quickly, you'll just have a very small system of very big computers that process at very high TPS. Some so-called blockchains are already doing that. And whether they are decentralized and trustworthy is open to debate. Certainly the conventional normie world has been doing this for a very long time. I'm sure that banks and, you know, credit card companies have very big data centers. But blockchains don't want

do that. They want to continue and maintain inclusive accountability that allows each and every one of us to use our laptop to check that everything is okay. So what are we going to do? Well, there's this amazing math that started in the 1980s, and we're not going to describe how it works. But to quote from one of the very earliest papers in this field, I'm probably misquoting the exact thing. I can find it later. But it says that using the... this technology, again, that was invented already in the 1980s, even a single weak computer can monitor and track a computation done by a herd of supercomputers, even if they are run on faulty hardware by malicious parties.

So it's a very cryptography is this amazing, powerful technology that allows even the weakest of computational devices to monitor and know with very high. certainty that a huge computer run by an evil government even has been executing with integrity. And this is completely mind-boggling. You know, the little man can basically check and know that some huge corporation, monopoly or government is operating correctly because of the power of cryptography. Now, this was already known, some parts of it were known in the 1980s. what was not known was how to make this really efficient and tractable.

And that's, I think, where a lot of the inventions coming from Starkware really help. And first of all, making it practical on today's computers. And more recently, making it available to programmers. I just read today someone that wrote, here's my experience of working on Starkman. And the very first sentence is, you do not need to know anything about the math of, It's all been abstracted away. You just have a programming language and you write your code

and you automatically, you know, you press a button. And so you just program as a developer. No math, no nothing. And you get this very low gas cost and the integrity offered by some magic that is behind the scenes. It's incredible. And by the way, I just got to say it's like cryptography is just what a gift to humanity, right? All of the technologies that we can unlock at the this juncture in humanity, we get this freedom technology that we've just unlocked. What a gift to humanity. It is. So one part, before we get into the conversation of Starkneck, if we definitely want to go to next, next, it's really fantastic that you guys have abstracted away all of this

complex technology and just allowed people to build on with his coding language and APIs. The other side of that spectrum is like, well, if you guys are just making it super easy, you guys are centralizing all of the development onto your guys' cloud server. So there's this one cloud server that's doing all of this central processing for these many, many systems. So what happens in the case where the police force of the United of the world come and knock on your door and says, well, unplug the server? What happens in that case?

Well, if it happens before we decentralize, which would be in a small number of months, then yes, you know, maybe we'll just, release everything before we go out with the police to some undisclosed location. But the plan and the hope in our, you know, we certainly believe this will be the case is that within a very small number of months, it won't be starker operating these things. The code will be available. And many, many operators, including you and Ryan, will be running it, just like with Ethereum. So kind of in that way where we talked about having the drop-down menu of where you deploy your data,

Might you have a drop-down menus like, oh, I want StarCware to run my server, or I want to run my server? Like you guys probably will do both. Well, like Ethereum, like, you know, you don't get to choose your minor. There's some consensus thing that pick the next. So something like that. You'll send it to some network, peer-to-peer network, and there'll be some mechanisms by which a decentralized network of provers and sequencers will pick it up and it will be accepted. You don't choose which one, but that's, I think that's probably even better.

You're not burdened with that. You just send your transactions at the network, Ethereum style. Wait, so is this now what you guys are talking about right now is, is that StarkNet or is that something to, okay. Exactly. So we've actually gotten into the Starknet. Okay, can you guys talk about the evolution from Stark X into StarkNet? How is that transition going to happen? Yeah, and I'm actually, as you're speaking, I'm actually going to bring up this, this diagram that I've seen in a lot of your documents that kind of illustrates it.

And yeah, so for people who can't see this in the podcast, there's a three. steps. And over the top, there's 2021 and 2022. And this is kind of the, this, this, this, Starkware roadmap as I see it. And, uh, this stark net roadmap to be more specific. The first step is planets that says single operators, single app roll-ups. The second step is constellations, single operators, multi-app roll-ups. These, these, these two steps are both in 2021. And then the third step in 2022 is the universe, which is decentralized operators, moving from single operators to decentralized and multi-app roll-ups as well. So with that context, too, yeah, to David's question. So, you know, planets is essentially Stark X, right? These are single operators. So rare,

immutable X, diversify, D-YD-X. They're each running a single app roll-up. Okay. And that's been in production, three of these systems went live in April. The numbers we quoted earlier, you know, exceeding 50 million transactions, et cetera. This is across all these systems. Constellations is essentially what's coming in a few days' time. And that is a single operator in the context of the Starkness system initially, much like the optimistic role of playbook, optimism, arbitram, we're following in the footsteps

of our very talented colleagues in the row-up space. starting with a single node operated by us. It will be a multi-app roll-up. This goes back to the composability point that I made earlier. So folks would be able to deploy their smart contracts on this, invoke one another smart contracts, and you would have a single roll-up with all these applications running on top of it.

And Universe, which is coming next year, is the fully decentralized vision, where the operator, namely the sequencer and Prover functions are fully decentralized, and all this bliss is shared across multiple applications, sharing a state, invoking one another, et cetera. So on the step two, the constellations, is this where immutable and DYDX will actually find themselves on the same roll-up? So that is a separate question of if and when the Stark X instances currently running

choose to port and move over and run over Starknet. Okay, but for Starc, for constellations, we're talking about, for example, teams like ZigZad, which is building a decentralized exchange that announced that they're going to be launching in a matter of days on Starknet and Influence.eath, a wonderfully talented team building a game. These will all deploy on Starknet and coexist there and be able to invoke one another. So go ahead, David. Okay. So the conversation that we've been having in the space, the space has been having, and I know a number of people that are confused by this point. The ZK roll-up bowls think that ZK roll-up EVM-powered ZK roll-ups are going to be here in six months.

The optimistic roll-up bowls think that the development and, like, infrastructure needed to make ZK-EVM roll-ups isn't going to be here for three to five years. what's going on? Like, what's true? So unfortunately, Vitalik published a post in early 2021 this year announcing that D.K. Roll-ups are the long-term solution

that they're coming in three to five years up. As we apologized already a few weeks ago, we're sort of ahead of schedule. So this tooling is here now. In fact, it's been on a public test event since the middle of June, supports general computation,

supports composability. There's still a ton of work to be done. And it's being done as we speak. If folks hop on the Starknet Discord, they'll see a very thriving ecosystem of tooling and infrastructure that's being built in a decentralized fashion by dozens of developers outside of StarCware.

Of course, StarCware itself is contributing a significant amount of talent and resources into this. But all this tooling is being built on a week-by-week basis and making tremendous progress in that respect. So we are able today to support essentially any application that wishes to build on top of Starknet. And in fact, what we're already seeing is people doing stuff that is just completely out of bounds on layer one. So to give a couple of examples, Guilty Gioza, just a brilliant programmer who's doing all these sort of physics simulations on Starknet.

Now, some people said, you know, what is that good for? I think that's sort of almost a silly question in the sense that the question is not, what is it good for? The question is, why aren't sort of people registering the fact that any computation, any computation that one chooses to do is now suddenly within the breach of blockchain developers, whereas when we were limited to layer one, it was a very sort of resource constrained environment. So, Yuri, I just want to just highlight the answer to that question. is like you're saying it's here now.

You're saying general purpose ZK roll-ups are here now ahead of schedule. And that last phrase, ahead of schedule? It's like, like, that's not something we hear very often in crypto. Well, I, yeah, okay, folks making those statements do not consult with us. Now that's fine. I mean, you know, making, it's well known that making, about the future is very hard. And if you're trying to predict something about a field of expertise,

it would be prudent to go and ask some of the experts and what they think. So, you know, you have two of the experts. It's not a prediction. You know, we have how many four systems running, many of them for more than a year. We just saw the numbers. Now, with general computation, on Ethereum, scaling it, as you mentioned, you know, two or three Ethereums, each one of them, today,

not three to five years, not six months. This is something that happened in the past. Now, next week sometime, Starknet Alpha, it's already in TestNet, but general computation, same sort of scale available to everyone. Next time you want to make predictions about ZK roll-ups, you know, you can know where to find us, DM us, check with us. before making the prediction. And yeah.

This is great. Look, this is incredible. You won't find a single person listening who will be disappointed that you just said that. Okay. We've just been, we feel like with crypto in terms of scalability, we've been disappointed too many times, right? Which is like when teams talk about dates and the shipping, it always seems to slip by.

Now, you guys are shipping. Yeah. So you guys are shipping. You have it. So can we talk about what then is shipping? next week, right? Like what exactly? So understand it's a general purpose version of a Starknet. Are there any applications that are launching? Is it going to be permissionless at launch? So can any team decide to start building on top of this or is there going to be a phased rollout, some sort of

white list? Yeah, give us some more details on what's shipping next week. We'll link a post with a lot of disclaimers on like what is not in there. So there's a lot of things that were very meticulous in pointing out, you know, we don't want to make false statements. So we'll share, there's a lot that we'll be missing initially next week. Account abstraction won't be there. There won't be RC20 tokens. There won't be any, it will be very hard to deal with fees.

a lot of things will be missing, but there will be applications. And in terms of deploying, anyone can submit a contract. Initially, for computational purposes, so the system might be buggy and not running as well as we want, we will do a white listing process, just like arbitrum and optimism and other L2s,

to ensure that our system, system is not crashing, and this will be removed later on. I'll find the link. I want to just mention some of the folks who are building, and some of these will launch with the Alpha, some in the weeks following the starting at Alpha launch. I want to reiterate what Eli said. This is called Alpha for a reason, and we strongly urge everyone to proceed with caution. When our training wheels are on, we're all sort of figuring this out together.

So, you know, we want sort of people to fully appreciate that fact. But some of the ecosystem that's being built around Starknet. So we have the Nethermind team who are building the Warp Transpiler and the Voyager block explore. The Open Zeppelin, we're defining the standard contracts for Starknet. And last time they defined that, that was for this blockchain called Ethereum. The Aragon and Equilibrium teams were building full nodes, Figment were building API services, Argent were building tooling in a wallet,

the Taurus wallet, ledger who are building an application to go live soon. The Shard Labs team building tooling, the Yuki front end team, multiple, a whole bunch of applications, a whole bunch of applications. So just to name a few, snapshot announced recently that Stark vote, we're building Stark vote together. So this is to make voting for Dow's once again sort of open to the general public and nod and exercise for the wealthy whales. There are multiple games being built. First and foremost, there's sort of the wonderful Parama, who was really one of the very first folks to start building on Starknet, building dope wars and another surprise sort of a game that will be announced very soon.

The proof of humanity team, Guilty Gioza, we mentioned, the influence team who are moving their wonderfully interesting game from the layer one Ethereum, Brexar clan, the Starknet.orgias framework by Sean Hanx Exchange, we mentioned the QSR team. Maker has a core unit. moving sort of maker to or deploying maker on Starknet and hopefully one day submitting die on Starknet. And rumor has it just following crypto Twitter. There's some that some core deaths of Avey are looking into building an Avey version on StarcNet.

So as you can see, there is an awful lot going on. So I can sort of give you exact dates of each one of these things. But we're talking weeks here for all these things to start blowing out. This is fantastic. and I'm wondering if you could kind of project forward six months for us, right? It's like getting into a user's head, right? So all of those apps sound wonderful if they're deployed on Starknet. That would be fantastic.

Also, other things that are important is wallet support, right? It's like, you know, the metamast of the world. You mentioned Argent, which is fantastic. Layer two, sorry, Fiat on ramps as well are going to be super important. So if you project this forward, you know, six months to maybe even like nine months to 12 months, Do you think all of those things will be in place? Like this will feel like basically a fast Ethereum type of experience, or do you think it's going to realistically take a little bit longer?

I'm an optimist, I think in six and definitely 12 months, all of that and much more. The main thing that look back and be surprised at is like some new classes of applications that cannot live on L1s because of the gas class. brunch there and suddenly there's some new class of stuff that, you know, we can't predict right now. It's going to be there. The main thing that will happen within the next six months and certainly nine months and

12 months is a lot of standardization and a lot of ecosystem growth will be a whole bunch of standards for various things, you know, account abstraction, fee abstraction, interactions, bridges, ERC-20s, ERC721s, and so on. and people will be using them. But much more importantly, it will be either past the decentralization point at Universe, where there will be multiple provers running permissionlessly and will probably also have decentralized validity for data availability and volition. Initially, we'll start in roll-up mode and will probably already be en route

to various decentralized governance mechanisms. and all they entail. So all of that will be, basically our goal is, you know, StarCware currently is, you know, a company that is running all the Star Provers for these production systems. And within six, nine to 12 months,

you'll see that dramatically changing and we will not be running the majority of the provers and sequencers and data availability providers. Well, Ellie, that gets right into the part of the conversation I want to go next, which is that long-term horizon for what Starkware is as it relates to the rest of the ecosystem. And ZK Tech is actually a platform agnostic tech. And so we actually can talk about this tech outside of Ethereum.

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Twitter at AlchemicsF-I and join the Discord to keep up to date with Alchemics V-I. V2 and to get involved in governance. All right, guys, we are back with the Starkware team coming into the second half of the show, just tying off some loose ends with some of the things that are not yet talked about on the show. And the first one I want to talk about is the long-term prospects for Starkware, the company, because you guys are trying to decentralize your own products, which kind of means you're trying to decentralize yourselves.

So what's the long-term future for you guys? What's the long-term future for Starkware? I want to take a swing of that. I would mention that we've decentralized successfully with our kids so far. I wanted to say that the number one objective is keep on having as much fun and meaningful fun and keep on expanding this amazingly talented and capable team that will grow into an ecosystem. and that's objective number one. But as David correctly pointed before the break,

ZK. Stark technology is much bigger than just a solution for, you know, scaling Ethereum. Initially, of course, it can and will be adopted by, we think, pretty much all blockchains that require scale. It's sort of just like all over the world, you know, you'll see fiber optics everywhere because they scale bandwidth really well. And you'll see, you know, cell, right, cellular phone technology everywhere because it's like scales, you know, communication or makes it easier.

You will see ZK. Starks on all blockchains that still exist. And we Starkware would like to help that happen once we can put our focus, right? You can only do one thing at a time. But beyond that, we think that this technology that allows even, let's go back to the photography that allows even simple citizens to sort of hold and check the strongest of monopolies and governments. This is something that we all need today. So we think it will permeate from that into the larger world. Now, that's about the technology. So there'll be a whole bunch,

there is already a whole bunch of other teams that are driving this forward with starts, and we're very proud to see them and help them. There's the Winterfell and Midden effort that is now incorporated into Polygon, and we very much support this effort. There are some other teams that we know are dabbling with Starks, but have not gone public with that information, and we support them as well. So this will be, there will be in multiple ones. Now, for Starkware, we hope, like, you know, what are we going to do after this decentralization? So, like two very possible routes after, like, let's say, decentralizing. One is it's very plausible that some of those conventional institutions and corporations and so on might want something that is their standalone version of Stark technology.

And we can help with that. And the second thing is hardware. As more and more approvers and more scale is demanded, we might want to try and help with that. So there's at least two opportunities. Well, Ellie, you want to ask you a question here about decentralization. So some other, I guess, layer two's answer to this partially and even layer ones is about, you know, community ownership as well, right? Some sort of like tokenization, some sort of form of community ownership, you know, whether that takes the form of a governance token or something like that. How important is community ownership to your roadmap to decentralization?

What would you say about that? Very important, but on the specific question of token, we hold to our position of no comment. Gotcha. That makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about, like you mentioned this with Ethereum, right? And you also mentioned that this technology is agnostic as well. But it seems like, as David and I have talked about this, it seems like those chains that have embraced this more modular design, this modular thesis, rather than maybe the contrast is a monolithic where you're doing execution and consensus and data availability all in the same platform. The more modular chains will be probably first to pick up this technology. Ethereum is definitely with a roll-up-centric roadmap, definitely adopted that.

NIR is maybe another one. Tezos is maybe a third. Do you think that the more modular chains will be first to adopt this sort of technology? And I guess do you have any thoughts or comments on where this might be first? might leave the rest of the blockchain space, like the more monolithic designs? Do you think they eventually capitulate and sort of become roll-up-centric and more modular design-oriented? Any longer-term thoughts here? This is something that's hard for me to predict for two reasons. One is that our focus is

just very limited on this one thing and Starknet. So it's very hard to, I mean, we did get approached a bunch of times by various L-1s, you know, asking if we wanted to, and we gave the same, we need to focus answer. And then I would say if I had to give an answer, I would say, just like I said with like fiber optics or cellular technology, Starks are going to be anything that still lives in, you know, five years in its blockchain will want to use just like, you know, any communication network in a modern country today probably has some fiber optics.

So I would say any blockchain that is massive. use, would also want to use ZK. Starks because they just offer you this asymmetry, right? Having one huge computer do a whole lot of work and everyone else trusting the outcome, even if that node doesn't have to be trusted. That's a very powerful technology that I think all blockchains are going to want. One subject we haven't touched upon yet is privacy. Are there any privacy ties in terms of what you guys are doing. Well, I mean, we are Starkware and all of it is like Stark and we're sort of omitting the ZK,

which is part of, you know, the whole line of stuff that we invented. Right. And we even did a little bit. There's some open source stuff that is already, you know, there's a signature, post-quantum secure signature that we developed that's also open source. And so, yes, for sure, at some point, we will add. privacy and ZK to, that's another thing about focusing, right? We, there's probably demand for that.

We just can't, you know, defocus right now. So, but yeah, there's tremendous opportunity in demand there. The scale with the privacy is, you're right. We sort of neglected it recently just for focusing purposes. Hey, David, you're muted. Thank you. One thing I want to ask about is the, economic sustainability of Starkware, the business.

Like, what's the actual business model there? How do you guys make money? Sure. So at the moment, StarkX, these are commercial agreements that we have with our customers that generate revenue. In StarkNet, we hope to be one of the participants in this open network and provide services to the network and hopefully generate revenue by doing so. As I mentioned, there are other venues to consider beyond that, for example.

hardware or building applications for the many normies we expect will show up and want to benefit from this beautiful decentralized, trustless world. So, you know, those are all directions that we're actively exploring and working on. Right. So with the commercial agreements with the Stark X chains, like mutable, D-Y-D-X, you're, if you're making money off these things, it must be coming off of the transaction fees of the network, right? I don't understand how it would be anything else. How are these agreements made with teams like DYDX and Immutable? And how does the – can you just illustrate the value flow

from the people that transact on these things to how it actually becomes economically sustainable for StarCware? Sure. So as, you know, is it just going to say going back to the DYDX numbers, if a DYDX transaction on layer one, if such a layer one existed that could support their existing throughput, if that's at 600,000 gas and on our system, they end up spending less than 500 gas. Well, there's a huge pie here.

And everyone could be made exceedingly happy. The customer, D-Y-D-X, start where. So, you know, there's a lot of value to be had. Is it just as simple as, say, I'm in. an immutable user, I'm on an immutable or D-Y-D-X, and then I make a transaction. The system charges me a dollar to transact on that layer two, and then that's split up between you and D-Y-D-X or you and immutable? I'll give an example.

Defy pooling is this beautiful service that seller is going live with powered by Starkex. And defy pulling caters to the long tail of defy participants who are priced out of the market on Ethereum Layer 1 today. They want to transact on Ave, on compound, whatever it is. Layer 1 transactions are absurdly expensive. We're talking about people who want to put a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to work and end up spending tens, maybe hundreds of dollars in transaction fees per transaction. Defy pooling basically allows them to move their assets to layer to pull them together,

like carpooling services. And those carpool services then initiate transaction single. layer one transactions that go from that layer two system onto layer one. So they pool together 100 users or 1,000 users that all go combine in a trustless fashion, say to initiate an AVE transaction. So a single layer one transaction now is split a cost so they can pay this service. They spend far less on gas. Ethereum is far less burdened with all these transactions.

AVE is getting all this action that would have been sort of just, you know, left out of the market. Sellers making money. Hopefully, Starkware is making money. Everyone is better off for it. The market is more efficient, right? Right. The pie is bigger. The pie is actually bigger.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. The cool thing about all these rollups, it adds just economic activity to the greater pie, right, growing the pie. So the idea for Starkware is that, you know, if we can, 2x the pie, you take like 5% of the extra growth or something like that. That's the business model? Well, 2KX, the pie, but yeah. Is there an actual like percentage that you guys charge or how do you guys actually

structure your fees? The fees are sort of commercial agreements that would be put in place with our customers and that handles sort of the revenue side of things. is there each each individual agreement with each individual chain is its own agreement or are they kind of just like similar agreements similar structures no no they're actually they're actually very similar in structure if not identical actually okay i want to say something about actually uh like potential uh you know business model just around fees on stark net for for and now not for stark word just for anyone running operators so um the argument goes like this um you know currently takes DoIDX as an example, right? We are consuming much less than 1% of the network, but offering scale that is like roughly 5x or 10x more than that. So there's like a thousand X factor or a thousand X reduction in cost between doing a transaction on L1 and doing it on our L2. So now, what if the fee charged by such an L2 would be, let's say, one-tenth the fee of an L-1?

So if you run the numbers, first of all, users would be extremely happy because they're paying just one-tenth. But this leaves huge profit margins for the network, right? And if you take into account that, for instance, on Ethereum today, the daily fees are around like $60 million, and you're taking the, you know, you're consuming one percent of the network, but you're charging, let's say, In total, 10x that while doing 1,000x more, everyone's happy. And the actual revenue per day for the operators is something around, if I got the numbers right, like $6 million per day just in fees. And most of it will be profit and the users are happy.

Now, I'm not saying this will be the main or only business model. And it's not something we explored in depth. But I'm saying just by the fact that there's this huge amount of fees being spent today on Ethereum, along with the amazing 1,000x scale factor that our L2 will bring starting next week, there's a very lucrative business model that sits just even there. Fantastic. That's a fantastic color. And guys, I want to thank you for your time in helping us unpack what is this really, really complicated technology in very easily to digestible ways. I want to zoom all the way back out for this last question. And something that really

just fascinates me personally is like the the relationships between humans and code right there's a there's a link here and crypto as me and ryan often say crypto is a political revolution it's not left or right but it is anti-authoritarian right uh and so when you guys are are looking at at starkware and looking at the code that you build do you see any sort of like values alignment like what how does starkware what you guys are building at starkware align with the values that you guys have sure So I can share my personal perspective. So looking back over the past few decades, technology is just technology, right?

It can do all sorts of things, good things and bad things. And often the same technology can be put to good use and malicious use. I think that a lot of the things that we're building are inherently for the better in the sense that they are inherently supportive of shifting the power of balance away from centralized entities into the hands of individuals in all sorts of very meaningful ways that Ellie alluded to earlier. And that is something we care for deeply. And I think it's something that a lot of people all over the world are concerned about, you know, these past few years, and they should be concerned about. And having the technology that can support those

values and do so at scale, meaning not as a thought experiment, not as a little sort of exercise and independence, but something that can actually serve their daily needs, yet protect those rights and privileges is something we care for deeply. I want to add two different thoughts. One, I think the values that we have at Stark where I think the first things that jump to mind that I think distinguishes us are like meritocracy and excellence. You know, we have like audit teams looking at our code and saying, you know, we haven't seen many code bases that are, you mentioned code like that are as professional

and clean, even though this is like very, very moon math stuff and very easy to get wrong. So I think we have, I mean, our whole team, right? it's both Uli and I don't really code but fortunately for all of you guys I don't think the audits

would have looked the same way had we dabbled in that but like this very we're very proud of this in you know excellence professionalism and meritocracy when it comes to

code but also you know to math and science and innovation. The second thing I would say is that we do, we are having fun, but we do recognize that through this, you know, opportunity offered by inventing a technology that we believe will transform the world, we understand that there's immense responsibility on our collective shoulders. We can try to get it right for humanity and we could mess it up. And I think so far, we've really, really tried to focus on making decisions that are correct, not only for our own personal short-term goals.

For instance, I'll give one example. We founded the company in 2017. Everyone was ICOing. Everyone said, guys, you know, just do an ICO. At the time, we raised 6 million. people were raising 10x and 100x on that with technology or with promises that were not as impressive as ours. So we didn't do that because we said it's not right for the state of the technology. And we went first for building very specific applications, handcrafted, like Star-X is very limited.

It does like a few things. so we're like treading with a lot of responsibility and recognition that we are lucky to have this power to unleash this technological revolution and we hope will make decisions that are good for all of humanity but who knows. L.A. Yuri, it's been an absolute pleasure. I think that's the perfect way to end it. tremendous amount of responsibility on our shoulders being early to this movement. We completely agree.

It's part of the bankless nation. It's part of the bankless journey. We appreciate so much what you guys are doing in the scalability space. And we are massively excited about StarkNet and what you're delivering both next week and in the weeks to come. So thanks for joining us today. Thank you, guys. It'll be a fun ride. Absolutely.

Bankless listeners, I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you learned a bit more about one of the premier layer two technologies coming. I certainly learned it was even, I knew it was close, but it was even closer than I thought at the end of this podcast. So once again, another bankless podcast, I am bullish. Some action items for you. If you are a builder, if you're interested in developing on Starknet and this technology, make sure you check out the show notes.

Join the Starkware Discord service where you'll find a lot of information about this. And fellow builders who you can build alongside, with. Also, we'll include a link to the post that was mentioned earlier about the StartNet Alpha release, and I expect to see some posts next week about the main net release too. Very excited about that. Risk and disclaimers, of course, none of this has been financial advice. Maybe this is scalability advice, though. ETH is risky. Defy is risky. Crypto is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

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