Visa trying out StarkNet, Kakarot meets Beerus and more
Basecamp Cohort 2 is About to Start
If you wanted to become a Cairo developer and create dapps on StarkNet but didn't know where to start, Basecamp is for you.
Basecamp is a FREE 6-week training program taught by the StarkNet Dev Advocacy team at StarkWare that covers all the language fundamentals, tools, architecture, best practices and math that will turn you into a StarkNet expert.
The first class starts in two weeks! So don't wait too long to register using this link.
Visa is Testing the Waters on StarkNet
The news that Visa was working on a Proof of Concept (PoC) for auto-payments using Account Abstraction on StarkNate took everyone, including StarkWare, by surprise.
It's great to see that such an important company is experimenting with the power and flexibility that account abstraction brings to self-custody. One can only hope that this is just the beginning of more ambitious experiments on StarkNet.
Read the Twitter thread below to learn more about Visa's PoC.


The StarkNet Foundation is Voting
In his second blog post, the StarkNet Foundation explains how decisions about upgrades to StarkNet will be made and how the community will participate. The first vote will focus on the proposed Cairo 0.11 upgrade.
It's Almost 9000!
Can you believe that in just 3 months Kakarot zk-EVM on StarkNet went from a dream to being only one opcode away from full implementation?
The community has been working tirelessly to complete Kakarot in record time so Solidity smart contracts can be deployed directly to StarkNet without the need for a compiler.
Kakarot will open a new chapter in adoption and scalability while showing the flexibility of StarkNet as a platform.

Introducing Beerus, a StarkNet Light Client
Beerus is a light client for StarkNet written in Rust that allows you to read data from StarkNet in a trustless way. This StarkNet light client is built on top of Helios, an Ethereum light client created by a16z to allow you to use untrusted RPC endpoints in a trustless way that is so small and efficient that it can potentially be embedded directly into web and mobile apps using WebAssembly.
There's a lot to explain here so I better leave it to Ben Goebel from StarkWare who has created a workshop explaining how Beerus work, how to install it and how to use it.
One Deployer Contract to Rule Them All
With the Cairo 0.10.3 upgrade, the deploy transaction was removed from the protocol and now a deployer smart contract has to be used instead. Open Zeppelin has created and deployed such a contract but how do you use it?
David Barreto from StarkWare and Darlington Nnam from Argent both created articles talking about the Universal Deployer Contract (UDC). Both articles are worth reading as they are complementary. While David focuses on how to use the UDC with the StarkNet CLI, Darlington shows you how to use the UDC with Argent X and Protostar.
Deploying contracts on Starknet using the Universal deployer contract
Preparing for Regenesis with the Proxy Pattern
With the introduction of Sierra on future upgrades to StarkNet even transactions that end up failing an assert will be able to be proven with SHARP. That's not the case today with smart contracts written with Cairo 0.10 so eventually, those smart contracts will need to be removed from the network so only fully provable programs are left.
That's what Regenesis is all about, cleaning the house after Sierra is introduced to hardening the security of the network. To future-proof your smart contracts written in Cairo 0.x you'll need to use the Proxy pattern to guarantee a smooth transition to Cairo 1.0 and to gracefully navigate Regenesis.
David Barreto tells you all about the Proxy pattern in his most recent article.
Upcoming Events
Jan 4th: Basecamp cohort 2 starts
Jan 17th: StarkNet Toronto Meetup
Feb 5th: StarkWare Sessions (Tel-Aviv)