Meet the projects working to expand the usability and scaling potential of the Stone Prover.
TL;DR
- Expanding the Starknet community’s access to STARK-tech solutions, including the battle-tested, open-source Stone prover, is central to Starknet’s journey toward decentralization.
- In tandem with our work on the next-generation Stwo prover, StarkWare joined forces with outstanding teams within the Starknet ecosystem to build additional components for unleashing Stone’s scaling potential.
- With these additions, developers will be able to use Stone to build appchains on Starknet—allowing total customization of their apps and lower costs—as well as generating proofs without the need for heavy machinery.
Introduction
In August 2023, StarkWare open-sourced its battle-tested Stone (STark ONE) prover, a cornerstone of the Starknet Layer 2 (L2) tech stack that has played a critical role in scaling Ethereum and laid the foundations for proving transactions for dApps built on Starknet. Open-sourcing Stone was a leap forward in the decentralization of Starknet’s technology and empowering the developer community to build upon it independently.
In February 2024, StarkWare announced it is developing the next-gen of STARK scaling: Stwo (Stark TWO). Stwo is a blazing-fast open-source prover that will leverage Circle STARKs, and various other optimizations, to bring unprecedented proving performance.
However, Stone is by no means growing moss. In fact, quite the opposite: Stone just got supercharged with two long-awaited features (more on that soon, so stay tuned).
But perhaps even more importantly, StarkWare has joined forces with outstanding teams within the Starknet ecosystem to build additional components for helping developers use Stone to achieve their scalability goals. This serves as yet another step in bringing greater decentralization to Starknet and expanding the community’s access to STARK-tech solutions.
In this post, you’ll find an overview of all projects working to unleash the power of Stone.
Powering L3 Stone appchains
As you may have heard, StarkWare has been working with Herodotus to develop a Stone-compatible Cairo verifier on Starknet. Just as Starknet proves its execution and verifies it on Ethereum, the Cairo verifier enables developers who would like to build a layer on top of Starknet—a Layer 3 (L3)—to prove their execution on their own layer and verify it on Starknet.
Powering L2 Stone appchains
If you still prefer L1 verification, zkSecurity is working on a STARK-EVM adapter. The adapter splits proofs generated by Stone to make them compatible with existing Cairo verifiers on Ethereum. In enabling developers to verify proofs generated by Stone on Ethereum, the STARK-EVM adapter is the missing piece of the puzzle in unleashing Stone-powered L2 appchains.
Integrating Stone with the Madara sequencer
Whether you prefer L2 or L3, Moonsong Labs has built a Stone wrapper designed to facilitate the seamless invocation of Stone within Madara. Madara is a high-performance Starknet sequencer, providing the power to create customizable and efficient appchains, and through this integration, developers can build plug-and-play appchains—both L2 and L3—with flexibility and ease.
Removing barriers to using Stone I
Alongside their work on Madara, Moonsong Labs has also integrated these capabilities into a one-click user-friendly CLI for Stone. This CLI allows developers to input compiled programs and program inputs and, in turn, handles the execution of the Cairo VM, manages the input for Stone, sets the optimal Stone configuration, and returns the generated proof.
Removing barriers to using Stone II
If Moongsong Lab’s CLI is making it easier to use Stone for everyone, Ingonyama is making it easier to use Stone for everything, by working on ways to add GPU support to Stone. The enhanced performance and improved latency delivered by hardware acceleration will eliminate the need for heavy machinery for generating proofs and even enable using Stone in web browsers.
Rustyfing Stone
Last but not least, Starknet developer Thor Kampefner (@cryptograthor) has kicked off Pebble, a work-in-progress Rust implementation of Stone. Pebble, designed for flexibility, aims to extend the support of new features in the future that are currently unavailable on Stone, like easy compilation to WebAssembly and supporting fully zero-knowledge proofs.
Summary
By teaming up with projects from within the community to build vital components that support the open-source Stone Prover, alongside working on the next-gen open-source Stwo Prover, we are making major strides toward expanding access to STARK-tech solutions and moving Starknet toward greater decentralization.
