StarkWare is one of the most important projects in crypto that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Part of that is due to their focus on zero-knowledge proofs, a promising technology that few understand, and another part due to their lack of a token, which means the broader community has less incentive to pay attention. As our long time members might recall, we first wrote about StarkWare back in April 2019 in a Thematic Insights on Zero-Knowledge Proofs. In that report, we highlighted a new product they were testing called StarkDEX, a settlement engine for decentralized exchanges built in conjunction with the 0x development team. While not quite the same product as StarkEx, a settlement engine geared towards centralized exchanges, they enable many of the same benefits.
Source: StarkWare Blog
As of today, StarkEx is now live on Ethereum’s Mainnet and is being used to power a relaunched DeversiFi. StarkEx is a non-custodial settlement engine that allows DeversiFi to now offer the following benefits:
- Speed – Settles 9,000+ trades per second on-chain, a massive increase
- Liquidity – Aggregates liquidity from centralized and self-custodial sources
- Non-Custodial – Traders remain in control of their assets. Even if DeversiFi goes offline users can still withdrawal their assets. A second-by-second countdown timer will show users exactly when their withdrawal will be processed.
- Privacy – Trading history is kept private
- Fees – Batching transactions for settlement significantly reduces their cost. As seen in the chart below, DeversiFi passes these savings onto its users by offering the most competitive fees of any self-custodial exchange.
Source: DeversiFi Blog
How does it work? Trades are processed off-chain, aggregated and a proof of their validity is submitted on-chain. Verifying the proof on-chain is fast and easy. How powerful can this technology be? On June 1st, the development team showcased its abilities by trustlessly onboarding 1.3m accounts with initial balances, demonstrating how an entire subreddit the size of r/FortNiteBR could be brought on Mainnet. They accomplished this over a 12 hour period while using only 2.5% of the network and paid gas prices that were 30% below average during that time. Accomplishing this without StarkEx would have consumed the entire network’s bandwidth for 4.5 days.
Prior to this relaunch, DeversiFi had been a top 0x Relayer. Over the past 30 days, DeversiFi was the #4 Relayer by volume with $3.38m traded over that period. While small relative to Tokenlon, the #1 Relayer with $77.98m over that same time period, this still represents a blow to the 0x ecosystem.
Source: Twitter
Source: 0xTracker
DeversiFi isn’t the only project adopting StarkEx though. Immutable, the creators of the popular NFT game Gods Unchained, will be implementing StarkEx to launch a new non-custodial exchange for NFT trading, called Immutable X. In this application, the benefits offered by StarkEx can be even greater. This is because non-fungible tokens create an even greater throughput bottleneck relative to fungible tokens. As they stated in their blog post “with NFTs, a thousand tokens actually consume a thousandfold more of the blockchain’s resources than a single token”.
We’ll be paying close attention to these and other projects that implement this technology moving forward.
Source: Reddit AMA
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