StarkWare Sessions ’23: Two STARK Days

Our second StarkWare Sessions is in the books. Here’s a recap of the top news, announcements, and workshops.

Some weeks after StarkWare Sessions 2023 and we’re still buzzing from the excitement. Over the course of two days Tel Aviv, we hosted over 1,000 attendees from all over the world, crypto ecosystem, and walks of life.

Designed to bring our ever-expanding StarkWare community together to meet, collaborate, and learn, the event exceeded our wildest expectations, serving as a promising beacon for the future of the Ethereum and Starknet developer community. None of it would have been possible without our main sponsors, Starknet native projects, StarkScan, Argent, and Braavos and many other sponsors that supported this event.

Those who wish to relive the magic can find recordings of all discussions and workshops on our YouTube channel.

In this article, we’ll recap a handful of the most noteworthy events, announcements, and news from this groundbreaking event.

Starknet Hacker Building

Leading up to the big event, the team from OnlyDust arranged a Hacker House (really, a whole building) to help expand the reach of the Starknet open-source community. Developers flocked from across the globe for a week of learning, collaborating, and building. Attendees launched and contributed to a host of open-source Starknet projects including:

• Kakarot — A Cairo-based EVM that can be deployed on Starknet.
• Cairo Foundry — A framework for Starknet contracts.
• Entry Component System — Also known as an ECS, which ensures that in-game objects coexist and interact with each other.
• Dip — A gateway to building cross-platform dApps. Developers can use Rust to write front ends for Cairo dApps using Dip.

Vibes remained high throughout the week, with all developers capping the fun off at the StarkWare Sessions.

Starknet Prover will be Open-Sourced

Shortly after open-sourcing Cairo 1.0 and the Papyrus full node, we’ve now announced the entire Starknet stack will be open-sourced. Both the Starknet Prover and Sequencer will be open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license to provide the most genuine path to build Starknet as a decentralized public good. This means more collaboration, freedom, transparency, and above all, a higher-quality product.

With this news, we’re one step closer to our vision of a decentralized, community-owned layer 2 network.

Chainlink Oracles on Starknet

StarkWare announced an exciting developer partnership with Chainlink Labs, marking a key milestone for Starknet data reliability. As part of the agreement, Starknet will join Chainlink’s SCALE (Sustainable Chainlink Access for Layer 1 and 2 Enablement) initiative equipping developers with low-cost oracle services. Already available on testnet (and soon to be available on mainnet),

Visa’s Stablecoin Settlements

In one of the event’s most exciting talks, Visa’s Head of Crypto, Cuy Sheffield, shared the company’s vision for digital assets, including the ability to convert from fiat to digital currencies.

“We’ve been testing how to actually accept settlement payments from issuers in USDC starting on Ethereum and paying out in USDC on Ethereum. So, these are large value settlement payments,” he said.

Sheffield also highlighted the potential use of smart accounts to schedule auto-payments from self-custodial wallets, without requiring users to manually sign off on every transaction.

StarkScan Upgrades

StarkScan announced a few big upgrades to StarkScan, to their Starknet block explorer:

Transparent token explore — Users can see top holders and transfers for each token address.

Complete portfolio — Users can now view their complete portfolio, including all arbitrary ERC20 tokens.

Transaction explorer — Track all ERC-20 transactions, including swaps and your favorite LP tokens on Starknet.

New and Emerging Technologies in Crypto and Blockchain

Both Starknet wallet apps, Braavos and Argent, made waves with groundbreaking announcements.

Braavos announced that all wallet account contracts will now be open-source, marking an important milestone in the accessibility and security of crypto. Meanwhile Argent broke the news of four new product updates including a seedless wallet creation (all you need is an email address!), on-chain 2FA for Argent X, Starknet wallet for mobile, and multi-sig for DAOs.

Other panel discussions and workshops highlighted advancements around Warp (Solidity to Cairo transpiler), zkVMs, Sierra, Aptos, and…

EIP-4844 — An Ethereum proposal that aims to scale layer 2 settlements on Ethereum.

Recursive proofs — A way to superscale Layer 2 performance by Layer 3 models.

On-chain data storage — Workshops were held to discuss different ways of on-chain data storage, including Validiums and Volition. These open doors for opportunities surrounding on-chain gaming and music storage.

Growing the Ecosystem

To onboard more developers into the ecosystem, we hosted a STARK 101 Day. The workshop walked developers through everything from the basics of STARK proofs to writing and deploying their first Starknet contracts.

What lies ahead?

With over 100+ projects building on top of Starknet and StarkEx and 450+ Cairo and Starknet Github repos fueling the engines, the future of STARK-Scaling has never been more promising. We were enthralled by the brilliance, passion, and creativity of our community.

As the use cases for STARKs continue to grow, we highly encourage you to get involved in the Starknet ecosystem, whether learning, building, or a mix of both. To stay up-to-date with all Starknet news, projects, and happenings follow along on Twitter. More importantly, keep an eye out for our global community events.