Ethereum scaling solution layer 2 StarkWare announced plans to open source Starknet Prover under the Apache 2.0 license, which has processed 327 million transactions and printed 95 million nonfungible tokens (NFT) to date.
Prover is the essential engine that Starkware uses to scroll through hundreds of thousands of transactions and compress them into tiny cryptographic proofs written on the Ethereum blockchain.
“We consider Prover to be the magic wand of Stark technology. It is amazing to produce evidence that allows unimaginable scale,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of Starkware.
Starkware has faced criticism from the crypto community and rival solutions such as ZK Sync and Polygon for holding the IP behind the technology, which contradicts the blockchain’s open source and interoperable ethics.
Making the prover open source under the Apache 2.0 license will enable any other project or network – or even a game or database developer – to make use of the technology, modify the code and manage it. The technology was released in 2020 and has been used by ImmutableX, Sorare and dYdX.
Avihu Levy, head of product Starkware, was reluctant to commit to a time frame for open-source prover but said it will happen after the launch of tokens and decentralization of Starknet itself. However, he agreed that this year he could do it.
“We want to move forward with a decentralized, permissionless network and that means you have to have this critical component,” he told Cointelegraph.
Levy said the decision to open source prover shows Starkware is more confident about the technology and said it will also enable the project to be more confident about using it as an important part of the protocol.
“At StarkEx, it is sometimes considered a lock-up or lock-in vendor. So the commitment is not only a business commitment, but a technology commitment for StarkEx,” he explained.
“This is a strong signal that you will have everything you need to run yourself independently of Starkware.”
Starkware has open-sourced the programming language and competitor EVM Cairo 1.0, Papyrus Full node and is in the process of open-sourcing a new sequencer.
Related: StarkNet overhauls Cairo programming language to drive developer adoption
Ben-Sasson launched the Starkware Sessions conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday, which organizers say is the largest layer 2 conference held to date.
“This is a landmark moment for the scale of Ethereum,” he said of the 500 developers and guests. “This will put Stark technology in the right place, as a common good that will be used to benefit everyone.”