Starknet’s impending upgrade is set to massively elevate the zk-Rollup’s throughput by a minimum of 50 times. However, it’s critical to distinguish between potential capacity and actual usage.
Starknet has implemented the Quantum Leap upgrade on a testnet, with the Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol claiming to handle “several hundred transactions per second”.
The potential leap in performance, at least a 50-fold improvement from its present capacity, is facilitated by the version 12 upgrade that synchronizes the sequencer’s code with the Cairo programming language.
As per a Starknet fact sheet, post-upgrade, the “time to inclusion” on the mainnet is expected to be “less than 15 seconds”. This suggests that decentralized applications could authenticate transactions on-chain within seconds.
Uri Kolodny, the co-founder, during an interview with Cointelegraph, cautiously mentioned that the upgrade has achieved “triple-digit” figures during testing.
If these test results replicate in actual usage – and a high Transaction Per Second (TPS) rate is as much a function of user demand as it is of technical ability – it would signify a significant stride for StarkWare, the Israeli company behind the decentralized scaling network.
Currently, Starknet is processing merely 1.79 TPS according to L2Beat, implying the upgrade could enhance transaction speed by 56 times or more. It would also easily surpass other Ethereum L2s, including Optimism mainnet (6 TPS), zkSync Era (8.63 TPS), and Arbitrum One (9.69 TPS), not to mention Ethereum itself (12.29 TPS).
However, for perspective, these TPS figures are still considerably less than Solana’s 4,127 TPS or Visa’s 1,700 TPS.
“Scaling has been the primary challenge that this ecosystem has been battling with over the past several years,” Kolodny admitted.
The Quantum Leap upgrade doesn’t rectify the data availability issue plaguing all zk-Rollups. The problem arises from Ethereum’s limited capacity to record all the necessary data for the L2 transactions, driving up costs.
The upcoming version 13 Volition upgrade, expected before the quarter ends, will address this by offering users fine-grained control to store high-value data on Ethereum, and less critical data elsewhere. It’s projected to reduce fees by 85%, potentially paving the way for affordable, speedy blockchain gaming and low-fee micropayments.
A vital component of the upgrade is Cairo-rs, a high-speed implementation of the Cairo virtual machine using Rust instead of Python, brought to you by LambdaClass, a venture studio.
Federico Carrone, the founder of LambdaClass, heralded the Quantum Leap as a “historic moment” for all blockchains.
On June 29, StarkWare announced that its validity-proof ZK scaling technology had already processed over $1 trillion in transactions.