Ethereum Layer-2 Network Starknet Surpasses $100M DeFi TVL

Ethereum layer-2 scaling network Starknet has now crossed a milestone of over $100 million in total value locked (TVL) on its platform. The latest breakthrough follows a recent network upgrade.

What is Starknet?

Starknet is a general-purpose scaling solution developed by Israeli software company StarkWare. The layer-2 network allows developers to deploy their decentralized applications (dApps) on its platform. It operates as a zero-knowledge rollup (validity rollup), a technology that speeds up transactions.

The network achieves this by bundling transactions into one transaction and sending them to the layer-1 Ethereum network. The benefits include high throughput, low gas fees, and high security common to Ethereum.

Starknet’s smart contracts are primarily written in Cairo language, a Turing programming language built for STARK proofs.

Starknet Crosses $100M

The latest milestone represents a 34.5% increase since Starknet deployed its recent v0.12.0 upgrade.

Starknet’s “Quantum Leap” upgrade was deployed two weeks ago on its Goerli testnet faucet. During this time, the network recorded up to 90 transactions per second (TPS) severally, though the TPS was consistently at 37, according to StarkWare.

A community vote ensued, with 97.91% of voters agreeing that the Quantum Leap be deployed on the mainnet. On July 12th, Starknet proceeded to launch the upgrade on its mainnet, increasing the number of TPS and reducing the confirmation time for each block.

Since then, the daily average TPS has reached a record high of 3.29 as of today. The network’s latency has also reduced from over 500 seconds to only around 15 seconds. Transaction time, on the other hand, has dropped from more than 700 seconds to about 30 seconds. The StarkWare team believes that Starknet’s TPS will increase to three digits following its upgrade to Quantum Leap.

Starkware CEO Uri Kolodny commended Starknet’s performance, saying:

“We said this upgrade would deliver potential TPS of hundreds within Q3, and only hoped from the stress test to check we’re on target. A few dozen TPS at this early point would have left us excited – but we got more than we bargained for.”