stark

StarkWare stated in an update on September 23 that the estimated GPU computing cost for preparing a quantum secure Bitcoin (QSB) transaction has dropped to below $67, a decrease of about 79% compared to the approximately $320 computing expenditure for the first similar mainnet transaction in August. According to StarkWare, the first QSB transaction was packaged and confirmed on August 26, with the engineering work completed by Tomer Giladi, and submitted directly through MARA's Slipstream service. The preparation process consumed about 3100 GPU hours, utilized around 100 GPUs, and incurred a computing cost of approximately $320, excluding Bitcoin network transaction fees.This cost reduction resulted from the quantum secure Bitcoin optimization challenge initiated on September 16 by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs. The challenge invited developers, researchers, and AI agents to optimize transaction construction software, ultimately resulting in 62 adopted improvements across two computational tasks required to prepare a QSB transaction, with benchmark tests showing an estimated computing cost reduction of about 79%. The relevant dashboard currently indicates that the estimated cost has further decreased to $66.The QSB proposal was released by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy in April, introducing hash-based quantum attack protection for transactions without altering Bitcoin's consensus rules. Due to limited cost, complexity, and applicability, he described it at the time as an emergency measure while continuing to advocate for adjustments at the protocol level.

Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder of Starknet, stated on social media that the recent rise of Zcash (ZEC) is partly due to market concerns that Bitcoin is "too rigid" at the protocol level. He mentioned that he "deeply loves Bitcoin," but still believes that these concerns are real, and noted that some Bitcoin holders have expressed to him that they have shifted part of their positions to ZEC.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, expressing the hope to include the recursive STARK memory pool proposal EIP-8288 in the Ethereum I-star upgrade, stating that it can be seen as the next step after Frames.This proposal allows quantum-safe signature data to be placed off-chain, reducing the cost of signatures; the fuel cost for quantum-safe privacy transactions is also expected to drop from about 10 million to tens of thousands. The proposal relies on frames and recursive STARK aggregated transaction dependencies, with nodes sending a STARK of about 100 to 300KB each time period; the on-chain overhead is one STARK and 96 bytes for each statement to be proven.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the Poseidon hash function series, developed over many years, has generated significant practical value in Ethereum and other fields, and will continue to play a role in the coming years.Modern privacy protocols can quickly generate SNARK proofs on the client side, and Poseidon is one of the important reasons for this. Vitalik pointed out that today's general-purpose STARK has achieved extremely high performance, with the proof overhead for almost any batch computation reduced to three-digit levels, and it is expected to further drop to two-digit levels or even lower in the future, a development that has even exceeded expectations from the early 2020s.

According to The Block, StarkWare announced that the first quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction has been successfully executed.StarkWare's Avihu Levy used signature aggregation technology to protect public key data while ensuring that transactions are secure in the Bitcoin mempool, thereby introducing a second layer of security to protect assets.

StarkWare announced that Starknet revenue has now flowed back into the Starknet ecosystem. This is the first time that StarkWare will delegate 25 million STRK generated from Starknet sequencer revenue back to the ecosystem.The aforementioned 25 million STRK will operate through delegation to support projects and contributors that help develop Starknet, further strengthening ecosystem construction.

Starknet announced that it has completed the quantum-resistant signature transfer test, where a wallet account using a quantum-resistant signature mechanism completed a real transfer on the Starknet mainnet, with a transaction fee of about 6 cents, and can be queried through the block explorer. This account is currently an experimental, unaudited version, mainly used for research testing. StarkWare stated that this transfer benefits from the design of the Starknet account model.Unlike most blockchains that fix the signature algorithm at the protocol layer, each account on Starknet is a smart contract that can autonomously define the accepted signature schemes, allowing users to upgrade their wallets from traditional elliptic curve signatures to quantum-resistant signatures without hard forks, asset migrations, or changing addresses. StarkWare pointed out that most blockchains face quantum computing risks because wallet signatures and underlying verification systems rely on elliptic curve cryptography. Once large-scale quantum computers appear, running Shor's algorithm could potentially break the related encryption systems. Currently, the Starknet ecosystem supports a quantum-resistant signature scheme based on Falcon-512, which is part of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process, with relevant implementations promoted by ecosystem teams and organizations such as OpenZeppelin.

Starknet announced the opening of its privacy development stack to developers, launching a privacy SDK and privacy wallet API, allowing applications, wallets, and protocols to integrate private balances, private transfers, and related DeFi interaction features based on STRK20.

According to official news, Starknet announced that STRK20 is officially launched, positioned as a privacy framework suitable for any assets in the Starknet ecosystem.This solution supports users to transfer assets into the privacy pool with one click, and developers can also integrate privacy features at a lower development cost through the software development kit and wallet application interface.

According to Cointelegraph, StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson posted on the X platform, proposing to replace Bitcoin's hard cap of 21 million coins with a 4% annual issuance rate. He believes the current hard cap is "unreasonable" because private keys will be lost over time, stating, "As time approaches infinity, all private keys will be lost." Ledger estimates that approximately 4 million Bitcoins have already been permanently lost. Ben-Sasson indicated that a 4% annual issuance rate roughly matches the global population growth rate.The proposal has sparked strong opposition from the community. Opponents argue that the fixed cap is at the core of Bitcoin's value, and that Bitcoin can be divided into 21 trillion satoshis, which is sufficient to address the issue of decreasing available supply. Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox suggested that Bitcoin developers refer to the "network sustainability mechanism" that Zcash is considering—maintaining the fixed cap but allowing users to destroy tokens, gradually reissuing them as block rewards over four years to alleviate the pressure on miner incentives without breaking the hard cap. Any such changes would require consensus among Bitcoin developers, miners, and node operators, which is extremely challenging under a decentralized governance model.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published the proposal "The Extremely Lean Chain," demonstrating how to radically compress the state requirements of the Ethereum consensus chain in the context of the "Lean" upgrade. This plan shifts responsibility to validators, who manage and periodically prove their state through ZK proofs, thereby eliminating the processing burden for each epoch and potentially supporting millions of validators.The core mechanisms include: removing the validator public keys from the on-chain state, storing only the deposit tree index; canceling real-time reward and penalty processing, with validators generating daily STARK proofs of their participation and updating balances; completely re-randomizing validator identities daily, achieving strong anonymity through ZK-STARK, with withdrawal addresses exposed only at the time of withdrawal and not publicly linked to deposits or on-chain activities. Vitalik stated that based on upgrades such as single-slot finality and quantum-resistant signature aggregation, the state requirement per validator could be compressed from approximately 180 bytes to 6 bytes. The daily proof cost for a single validator requires processing about 5400 Merkle branches, which can be completed within 1 hour on ordinary hardware, and the on-chain burden can be reduced through aggregated proofs. Additionally, this design can achieve a "virtually free" single secret leader election function, with 1 day as the conservative cycle length and 1 hour as the lower limit.

According to Cointelegraph, StarkWare has released the Starknet post-quantum roadmap, stating that the roadmap is divided into three phases to address the risks of future quantum computing attacks.The first phase of the roadmap includes replacing some existing security mathematical mechanisms, specifically the Pedersen hash, with post-quantum versions and adding post-quantum signatures; the second phase focuses on migration tools that upgrade existing smart contracts without requiring developers to manually rebuild applications; the third phase involves dependencies that Starknet cannot resolve on its own, primarily relying on Ethereum's quantum upgrade roadmap.

USDC announced on platform X that the USDC privacy feature is now live on Starknet, implemented through STRK20------this is the privacy feature Starknet provides for ERC-20 tokens, with built-in compliance capabilities. Users can mask, send, and unmask USDC while keeping balance, amount, and counterparty information private on the public ledger. USDC remains a dollar-pegged stablecoin, and the new privacy feature is applicable to payments, fund flows, payroll, and on-chain financial activities on Starknet.

StarkWare launches the STRK20 privacy token standard, allowing users to hide on-chain balances and transaction details while maintaining compliance checks and regulatory disclosure mechanisms.

The Starknet AMM protocol mySwap disclosed that its mySwap CL protocol suffered a vulnerability attack, resulting in approximately $300,000 being withdrawn from the liquidity pool. The official statement indicated that the mySwap interface has been closed for over 6 months and is no longer accepting new liquidity injections. The affected funds were mainly the remaining LP positions scattered across more than 100,000 positions. The attacker utilized the funds stolen through bridging and obscured the asset flow using Railgun. This attack nearly depleted all remaining liquidity in the protocol.

According to The Block, Starknet has launched the zero-knowledge privacy framework STRK20, which provides balance shielding and private transfer capabilities for any ERC20 asset on the network, and has first been implemented on strkBTC.This framework allows developers to introduce privacy features for scenarios such as transfers, exchanges, lending, staking, payments, and donations without the need to build a separate privacy system.STRK20 embeds a "shielding" mode in the asset path, rather than using a traditional mixer structure, while introducing a viewing key mechanism that selectively discloses specific wallet information only upon receiving legally valid requests, balancing privacy protection and compliance requirements.StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson believes that such ZK privacy solutions are expected to make regulatory investigations more precise and reduce the collateral impact on a large number of wallets.

StarkWare announced on the X platform that the Starknet v0.14.3 version will go live on the mainnet this month, with the testnet launch scheduled for June 9 and the mainnet launch scheduled for June 22. The new version will support dynamic L2 Gas base fee adjustments based on STRK, improve block generation speed, reduce the target L2 Gas consumption per block while keeping the maximum block size unchanged, and deprecate RPC 0.8.Due to the significant changes included in this update, the official recommends that all developers carefully read the pre-release notes to prepare for compatibility and upgrades.

The Ethereum Layer 2 network Starknet developed by StarkWare officially launched strkBTC, a new type of asset based on Bitcoin, designed to achieve privacy balances and anonymous transfers through zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology, while maintaining composability with DeFi applications.After the launch of strkBTC, it supports "re-anonymization," allowing assets to be bridged back to a new, unassociated Bitcoin address, and provides compliance auditing and asset screening functions.