gm fellow STARK enthusiasts! ✨🐺
Welcome to the 11th edition of my weekly comprehensive StarkNet summary. The previous update can be found here. 👇🏻
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Let’s get into this week’s news! 💪
Protocol & dev tool updates
StarkWare announces strategic partnership with Equilibrium. With the Pathfinder full node already operating, and more dev tools in the pipeline, their teams are committed to growing the StarkNet ecosystem.
Meet Voyager, StarkNet's block explorer: An essential piece of the StarkNet ecosystem developed by Nethermind in partnership with StarkWare. With its integration with the Argent X wallet, you can start exploring it today.
StarkNet.py SDK v0.2.0has been released, bringing support for StarkNet Alpha v0.8.0.New version of
starknet-hardhat-plugin v0.5.2 has been released.StarkNet nodes have cut down deployment time from 35 minutes to 3 minutes, a 10x improvement.
Federico Carrone implemented a Circom (SNARK) verifier to Cairo (STARK).
vanYugart finished
a finite field libraryfor future usage. Their next step is to rewrite their elliptic curve lib with this new ff lib.ApeFramework is going to be the first professional-grade smart contract development framework to support multi-chain application development, including non-EVM chains like StarkNet.
bing ported over the
crowdfund contract as seen in solidity-by-example to Cairo - kickstark.The first testable version of StarkNet
multi-signature functionalityhas been published. Here’s the Github with instructions. Next in line: allow arbitrary multisig transactions and a real UI. - by Lauri Peltonen.StarkNet
GoLang library Caigo v0.2.0was released by bennyG.New release of
pytest-cairointroduces helper functions for setting block number, caller address etc, and allows you to deploy contracts directly from your tests for a more complex set up. - by Tim Nooren.dhruvkelawala.eth announced the implementation of base64 encoding in Cairo. This is the first step towards on-chain NFTs on StarkNet.
Media highlights
Account Abstraction is a game changer for the adoption of self-custody. But it's also a new paradigm for dapp developers. WTF is Account Abstraction? Blog post by Argent.
StarkNet Community Call #11 - MatchboxDAO ft. presentations of Ogame and Solve 2 Mint. Notes here.
Twitter space recording of imrgoyal with sylvechv and wraitii from briqNFT on a discussion regarding NFTs and Gaming on Starknet and its overall impact on the metaverse future.
MatchboxDAO Primitives for Cairo - Encode workshop, video + slides.
Twitter space recording of ZKPad’s AMA #4.
Job Board
This newsletter isn’t just the most comprehensive and most read source of StarkNet news, it’s also the perfect place to list your StarkNet job offers.
Open positions
Magnety, asset management protocol: Cairo developer & UX/UI designer.
JediSwap, AMM: Contribute in their open Mesh program.
ZkPad, decentralized crypto launchpad and incubator on StarkNet: UX/UI designer to join their fully remote team.
MatchboxDAO, on-chain games incubator: Technical and Product Lead with an understanding of zk rollups (bonus if you know Cairo), to lead a variety of our technical projects and manage teams of developers.
SithSwap, AMM: professional content and documentation (GitBook) writer with in-depth knowledge of the Uniswap V2 and Curve Finance protocol mechanics (their AMM + Curve tokenomics). Contact: Twitter, Telegram, Discord.
Auclantis, NFT marketplace: functional engineer to build the best NFT API on Ethereum and StarkNet.
Redline, racing game: Cairo developer to create race contracts, tournament systems, tokens and NFTs - as well as 4 other open roles.
The Ninth, metaverse game: freelance blockchain developer with professional knowledge of blockchain technologies and work experience with Solidity, Cairo or zk snarks. Contact email.
Brine finance, decentralized order-book exchange: community manager who is experienced at executing marketing campaigns, expertly engaging and igniting communities and leading narrative design.
nftJorge: Starknet developer to build and maintain the StarkNet component of our multi-chain marketplace currently in stealth. We are a company building out a decentralised hyper realistic Metaverse with an in-game (and standalone) marketplace. Twitter, Email.
ZKX, derivatives protocol: Senior software developer (Solidity/Cairo) & Head of Growth.
Bibliotheca DAO: experienced Creative director to spearhead Art style across the decentralised Lootverse they are building on StarkNet. Web3 Adventurers can apply by joining the Bibliotheca DAO discord and messaging LordOfAFew.
ZKasino: An innovative non-custodial casino project is seeking to bring in fast learning and enthusiastic Cairo developers to build game contracts. For enquiries, join Matchbox DAO's Discord at: https://discord.gg/7FmkTfGZRP and send a message in the ZKasino chat!
PlayOasis: NFT marketplace where our clients offer and list nfts with near zero gas fees. We are looking for a software engineer to work on frontend, backend and smart contracts. REQUIRED EXPERIENCE: Coding knowledge and experience is required. Contact email.
Yuki Labs are hiring Senior Frontend Engineers (React Typescript) and Product Designers to help Ethereum and Layer 2 teams ship outstanding user experiences.
Ecosystem news
Want to build on StarkNet? Check out this building on StarkNet page.
xBank has launched on testnet, officially making it the first production-ready liquidity market on StarkNet and the first protocol written natively in Cairo with a complete audit report.
Delphi Digital led a $5 million seed round in zkLend, a money market protocol built on StarkNet. Coverage by CoinDesk.
DopeWars showed off some development progress and shared a teaser.
Uday Jhunjhunwala is building a private Prediction Market on StarkNet.
Metaverse game The Ninth shows off their Hidden Information Game "Divide and Conquer".
Test deployments of Ogame are working as expected and tokens of resources are visible on Argent X. A v0.1 to be launched soon, by ametel01.
StarkSwap is LIVE on testnet. Give it a try.
briq alpha 1.6 is out. It introduces the new Rotate feature and a lot of bugfixes. Select briqs and use the rotation gizmo to spin them around.
Continually updated list of projects building on StarkNet. 🏗️
Ecosystem stats
StarkNet node count: 199 nodes and counting.
Last week, 350k transactions were made from Argent X wallets on StarkNet testnet. 2 months ago, that number was at 20k transactions per week.
1,589 new smart contracts have been deployed on StarkNet in March. This number 2x’d month over month from November until now.
Weekly StarkNet stats: 261k txs on Goerli, 3.2k txs on Mainnet. To date: 2.6m txs on Goerli, 78k txs on Mainnet. Contracts deployed last week: 28.5k on Goerli, 1.7k on Mainnet.
StarkNet Community & Shamans Highlights
Poll: What do you consider to be the most crucial property that StarkNet's decentralised consensus algorithm will have?
StarkNet Decentralization - Tendermint based suggestion
The primary motivation of this suggestion is to let StarkNet have fast finality, which is economically backed by a lot of stake. We also try to leverage Tendermint 1 - a well-established BFT protocol deployed on numerous blockchains.
On the downside, due to the quadratic complexity of Tendermint, this suggestion limits (in practice) the sequencers amount to a few dozens. However, since sequencers can’t include invalid transactions as everything is proven to Ethereum, there is appealing to have a more performant algorithm with only a few active validators each time, compared to similar potential designs for L1s.
Transaction lifecycle diagram by maciejka
Useful links & articles
Past week
StarkNet Tutorial Thread - How to use the Argent X wallet by Nurstar.eth.
A recap of what we know so far in terms of tokenomics on StarkNet applications - thread by The Stark Knight.
Argent is sponsoring 2 devs to go to StarkWare's hackathon: Amsterdam, 25-26 April. If you're early in your career & excited to build on StarkNet, apply.
Video overview covering the state-machine view of Ethereum, the tension between underlying node hardware and L1 scaling, how gas pricing affects L1 scaling, and then an overview of L2 scaling by Jordan McKinney.
Big StarkWare overview thread by Thien Nguyen.
odin free shares some impressive StarkNet statistics.
Deep dive into NFT marketplace oasis by nurstar.eth.
5 tutorials for how to setup your own StarkNet node by odin free.
This week
Running a StarkNet node on a Raspberry Pi - a guide by Joel Kite.
Coining the term gaMEV - by Sylve.
Thread: Introduction to asset management protocol Magnety.
Hello Frens ! What is @magnetyfi ? A short introduction of a L2 asset management aggregation protocol 👀 👀 magnety.notion.site/magnety/Magnet… Artwork by Discord user SFD.eth A thread (1/13) 🧵 🪡 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼
Thread: Introduction to StarkNet DEXs.
Developer resources
Past week
Cairo Goldmine: A comprehensive, annotated list of 300+ repositories of the StarkNet ecosystem, by abstractnull, has been updated with more than 15 new repos.
Great discussion about multisig implementation choices by Lauri Peltonen.
How do STARKs work? Compilation of resources by Eli Ben-Sasson.
This week
The underhanded Cairo contest is live from April 2nd to 23rd.
Using Shamir’s secret sharing to share mnemonics - article by Nethermind.
Repo that shows the cairo equivalents of the Solidity language patterns by Kermo.
Dates and Events
next community call April 12th: Open for presentation, roadmap update by StarkNet team.
Encode x StarkNet hackathon: Feb 28th until April. Here’s a blog post outlining the Hackathon challenges.
milancermak from LootRealms & Lindy_Labs will be holding a talk in Brno about StarkNet and its programming language Cairo, April 4th.
StarkNet Denver Meetup: April 5th 5:30-7:30pm MST - Enterprise Coworking RiNo - Pizza and beer.
First Cairo and Starknet meetup in Buenos Aires, Argentina. April 15th, 6pm.
StarkWare is a sponsor for Layer 2 Amsterdam: April 19th-20th.
Lightshift StarkNet bootcamp in Amsterdam: April 20th-21st.
Ariel Elperin from StarkWare will be a speaker at The Secureum TrustX, a first-of-its-kind Ethereum security event in collaboration with EFDevconnect, in Amsterdam, April 21st-22nd.
First ever StarkNet hackathon: April 25-26, Amsterdam. Registrations now open. 0xjanek and jniset from Argent, as well as guiltygyoza, imrgoyal from JediSwap and Francesco Ceccon will be there, mentoring hackers and sharing their input! Addition: Meet the Magnety team in Amsterdam.
Ohad Barta will be the first speaker at L2Beat’s L2 conference in Amsterdam. Ohad's lecture will cover how L2s in general, and StarkNet in particular, create a new paradigm when developing dApps for blockchains.
StarkNet Summit: TBD
Please note that, in order to keep this newsletter at an acceptable length, I am purging the sections “Useful links and articles” and “Developer resources” on a biweekly basis. Thus they are divided into the sections “past week” and “this week”. You can check out all of the past updates here.
None of the content of this newsletter is financial advice. Always do your own research.
Thank you for reading, and see you next week. ⏳
Special thanks to odin_free and starkwhale for helping me source some of the information! 🔍