StarkWare

StarkWare is a software company focused on delivering scaling solutions for the Ethereum blockchain. They provide two major products in StarkNet and StarkEx.

The term STARK refers to Scalable Transparent ARgument of Knowledge [1].

StarkEx was launched on Mainnet in June 2020 and is offering a standalone ZK-Rollup SaaS architecture for several use cases like NFT minting & trading, derivative trading as well as AMM and spot trading. It is used by dydx, sorare or Immutable to power their decentralized applications [2]. There is no composability and each app is encapsulated [3].

StarkNet is still in the Alpha phase on the Testnet and represents a permissionless decentralized ZK-Rollup with composability. They recently launched their so-called StarkGATE token bridge to allow ETH transfers from Ethereum to StarkNet [3].

Moreover, StarkWare introduced their own programming language Cairo that powers StarkEx and is used as the native smart contract language for StarkNet.

How does StarEx work?

As mentioned before, StarkEx is a service provided to Dapps and offers its customers to build their own business logic while running on the StarkEx Service [4]:

In simple terms, there are 4 steps [2]:

Batching of user transactions off-chain and sending to StarkEx Service
Validation of Transactions and Update of relevant balances
Generating a STARK proof attesting validity of the transactions in the batch and send proof on-chain
On-chain verifier smart contract receives and verifies the proof and new balances are stored on-chain

How to use StarkEx?

The following Dapps run on StarkEx - so by using them you will use StarkEx technology:

dydx - perpetual swap trading
sorare - football trading cards
Immutable - NFT marketplace
DeversiFi - spot trading
Celer - blockchain interoperability

Moreover, there is a StartkEx playground available here.

How does StarkNet work?

StarkNet is a permissionless decentralized ZK-Rollup operating as an L2 network over Ethereum.

"The StarkNet node (called sequencer) is implemented in Python. The StarkNet transaction execution environment, called StarkNet OS (similar to the Ethereum Virtual Machine), is implemented in Cairo. This optimizes the proving performance of each transaction execution. A Solidity contract deployed on Ethereum connects the StarkNet network (L2) to Ethereum (L1)." [5]

The details on the technical docs can be found here.

How to use StarkNet?

As mentioned before, StarkNet is still in the Alpha phase, thus currently only the StarkGate bridge is active on Mainnet:

StarkGate

On the Testnet, there exist various protocols to play around with. Be aware that you need to set up Argent X as Browser Wallet to make use of StarkNet.