StarkWare Sessions Highlights
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StarkWare Sessions Highlights
Our selection of talks for builders from StarkWare Sessions 2023 in Tel Aviv
Never before so many giga brains have been spotted in the same place and at the same time as in StarkWare Sessions 2023.
The two-day event took place in Tel Aviv, StarkWare’s hometown, in early February. Builders, researchers and community members from all over the world traveled to Israel’s capital to be treated with talks from the likes of professor Noam Nisan, Dankrad Feist, Emin Gün Sirer, Stani Kulechov, Eric Wall and many others including of course our very own Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny. You can see the full list of speakers here.
The talks covered a broad spectrum of topics: StarkNet’s present and future, Cairo 1.0, the math behind validity proofs, projects building on StarkNet, discussion panels and more. You can find the recordings of all these talks on StarkWare’s YouTube channel.
What follows is an opinionated list of the talks we believe might be the most useful and actionable for builders but all the talks are worth watching.
STARK End Game
Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-Founder and President of StarkWare, opens StarkWare Sessions 2023 with a talk reviewing the research done over decades that eventually led to STARK proofs, his proposal back in 2013 to use validity proofs on Bitcoin to reduce node synchronization time and a high-level explanation of how validity proofs work using Sudoku as an analogy.
Eli also shares some jaw-dropping statistics of StarkEx and StarkNet and the impact of the activation of recursive proofs on mainnet. If you are looking for hard numbers to be convinced of the power of Cairo, this keynote has them all.
Watch until the end to hear what's probably the biggest announcement of the conference. No spoilers.
A Taste of Cairo 1
Yuval Goldberg from StarkWare talks about what has been implemented in Cairo 1.0 so far using multiple code snippets to illustrate the similarities and differences from Rust. He also talks about the role of directives to create smart contracts and the planned improvements to the language to make Cairo a more powerful and easier to use language. If you are a builder, this is a talk you don't want to miss.
StarkNet in Rust
In our quest to improve StarkNet's performance, the system is being rewritten in Rust to replace the current Python implementation. Given the complexity of StarkNet, the rewrite is being done by module instead of a big bang approach and the work has been spearheaded by LambdaClass. Herman Obst talks about the progress LambdaClass has made so far in Rust-ifying StarkNet and some early benchmarks comparing the current and the new implementation.
StarkNet Community Update
In his talk, Tom Brand from StarkWare walks us through the progress made on Cairo 1.0 and the changes expected in the upcoming StarkNet 0.11, 0.12 and even 0.13 releases. Tom also shares StarkWare's expectations of cost reductions when using StarkNet as a result of a new Data Availability mode to be introduced in StarkNet 0.13.
Account Abstraction, Messaging and Block Explorers
Sean Han, the co-founder of StarkScan, showcases improvements in the UX of this StarkNet block explorer that would make it easy to understand users intentions when making calls through their User Accounts as required per the Account Abstraction model of StarkNet.
Sean also shows how to use StarkScan to track the status of tokens and messages being bridged between L1 and L2. This will hopefully make using StarkGate easier as users will have full knowledge of the status of their deposit or withdrawal from StarkNet.
Upcoming Events
Feb 24th: ETH Denver BUIDLWeek
Feb 26th: StarkNet Mixer (Denver)
Feb 27th: Interop Summit (Denver)
Feb 27th: ZK Day (Denver)
Feb 28th: Web3 Security Afternoon (Denver)
March 1st: Layer 2 Day (Denver)
March 2nd: ETH Denver
March 3rd: STARKDenver
March 4th: In the Name of Account Abstraction (Denver)