In the battle for layers 2, there are several criteria, and the number of transactions per second is undoubtedly one of the most important. It is for this reason that the various players are vying with each other to make announcements. This Wednesday, it was StarkWare that announced the release on 13 July of an update to its Starknet network that will significantly increase its velocity.
Starknet is one of Ethereum's secondary-layer networks that provide relief for the sector's second-largest blockchain.
"The new version of Starknet, Quantum Leap, is exactly what its name suggests: a quantum leap in processing capacity such as no one has yet achieved in the Ethereum ecosystem," explains Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of StarkWare, the Israeli start-up that initiated the development of Starknet.
"Quantum Leap" should be able to process several hundred transactions per second.
The Ethereum blockchain is regularly congested during peaks in activity, which has led its community to develop secondary layer solutions to divert traffic and prevent transaction costs from spiralling out of control. Starknet is one of these alongside other players Arbitrum, Optimism and ZkSync.
To date, Arbitrum captures around 60% of the "Layers 2" market share, while Starknet is still struggling to establish itself with less than 1% of the market (0.73%). The latter is in 9th place, according to comparator L2Beat.
"We've been in testnet since 2021 and had very few features to start with," justifies Louis Guthmann, in charge of ecosystem development at StarkWare. "Contracts couldn't talk to each other and the tools reserved for developers were limited, the Cairo programming language was difficult to access, but we have since managed to overcome these problems"
Prior to Starknet, start-up Starkware had made a name for itself by developing a solution enabling NFT giant Sorare to offer virtually non-existent transaction fees on its fantasy football game. This product, called StarkEx and available à la carte according to project requirements, recently passed the $1,000 billion transaction threshold.
The leap by "Quantum Leap" in terms of transactions per second is therefore certainly excellent news for innovation in the sector, but this impressive figure needs to be tempered because few protocols require such high performance.
Leader Arbitrum currently processes around 12 transactions per second, and the maximum recorded on its protocol dates back to last March with 33 transactions, all without fees having skyrocketed.
"We are not making bets by offering high velocity," insists Louis Guthmann. "We are providing access to all the most important functionalities for crypto to achieve mass adoption, the blockchain industry must not project today's use cases to define developments in the years to come," he assures.
