Eli Ben-Sasson, founder of zero-knowledge (ZK) aggregation technology firm StarkWare, said its new recursive proof of validity could theoretically aggregate up to 60 million transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.
The co-inventor of zkSTARK made comments to Cointelegraph at the ETH conference in Seoul on Aug. 7, after announcing the start of production of StarkWare’s new recursive proof-of-validity technology in a presentation.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson said that recursive proofs of validity could further increase transaction throughput by a factor of at least 10 compared to the standard Validium extension, noting that they are already working on the ImmutableX protocol.
“I would say the minimum is 10x […] We have staked 600,000 NFTs and each mint generates 10 gas. We can now extract at least 10 such proofs and generate a recursive proof for all 10 things,” he explained.
“We can get to at least six million and that’s in the short term. It’s easy to do.”
However, Ben-Sasson also added that the number could “reach 60 million with more engineering and tweaking,” adding:
“I think it’s also very feasible to reduce latency by a factor of 5 to 10.”
StarkNet is a permissionless and decentralized layer 2 ZK-rollup that uses Validium to scale transactions. Like standard ZK-Rollups, Validium works by aggregating thousands of transactions into a single transaction. StarkNet’s new recursive validity proof technique can pack multiple Validium blocks into a single proof.
This scaling solution could be a game-changer for Ethereum, as layer 2 scaling solutions like ZK-Rollups and StarkNet’s recursive validity proofs can alleviate much of the network congestion and data availability issues that plague the Ethereum mainnet. Currently, Ethereum’s mainnet can process transactions at a rate of 12-15 transactions per second (TPS).
In his presentation at ETH Seoul, Ben-Sasson pointed out that recursion is great for scaling because it reduces gas costs, has higher proof capacity and provides lower latency.
Starknet just turned on recursion for their production SHARP system. Recursive proofs can significantly reduce the amortized cost per transaction on L1 and introduce a STARK-based security model for layer 3. It’s exciting to witness the launch of deep scaling solutions.
— g.mirror.xyz (@strangechances) August 7, 2022
StarkNet has been running on the Ethereum mainnet since June 2020. It currently provides support for protocols such as dYdX, Immutable, DeversiFi, and Celer.
Related: Blockchain’s Scaling Problem, Explained
Ethereum founder also speaks at ETH Seoul on Sunday Vitalik Buterin expressed his enthusiasm for ZK-rollups, further stating that scaling solutions are superior to Optimistic Rollups:
“In the long run, ZK-Rollups will ultimately beat Optimistic Rollups because they have these fundamental advantages, such as not requiring a seven-day exit period.”
Ethereum-based scaling so far solution The highest total value locked (TVL) is Arbitrum, Optimism, dYdX and Loopring.
