Alchemy has announced support for StarkNet, a move that promises significantly lower gas fees. StarkNet uses ZK-rollup, allowing it to offer a significantly higher throughput while offering gas fees up to 100 times lower than those expected on Layer-1 solutions.
However, while offering lower gas fees and higher throughput, ZK-rollups allow StarkNet to offer the same decentralization, security, and composability of Ethereum-based networks.
Leveraging Alchemy’s Suite Of Proprietary Platform Infrastructure
StarkNet is looking to leverage Alchemy’s Proprietary Platform Infrastructure technology suite and hopes to attract more developers to build on the chain. This also includes Alchemy’s Supernode, which allows for the scaling of every piece of node functionality, along with dedicated distributed systems and other critical developer products such as systems for debugging, tools to fetch real-time transaction insights, and a new NFT API.
Speaking about the partnership, Co-Founder and President of StarkNet stated,
“StarkNet and Alchemy are both pioneering the Web3 future, addressing two of the biggest challenges facing permissionless blockchains: StarkNet is tackling scalability, as Alchemy provides a complete platform for developers that reduces the complexity and costs of building on the blockchain.”
Understanding ZK-roll-ups
Layer-2 solutions allow the processing of a large batch of transactions away from Ethereum’s main chain, after which it writes a record of the transactions on Ethereum periodically. While StarkNet is not the first company to utilize roll-ups, it has gained significant traction thanks to the use of something called “zero knowledge proofs,” also known as ZKs. ZK allows for the confirmation of specific data without disclosing any private information.
A Solution To The Issues Of Web3
Starknet’s utilization of validity and ZK-rollups could offer a solution to the issues faced by Web3, allowing for the increase of scalability by bunching transactions together off-chain and then completing the verification on-chain at a fraction of the cost. However, compared to other scaling solutions, validity roll-ups utilize validity proofs, which can instantly verify the validity of transactions.
This significantly increases throughput while also maintaining the interoperability and security of Layer 1s and Layer 2s. The StarkNet transactions are also estimated to reduce energy consumption significantly.
“StarkNet’s utilization of Validity and ZK-rollups effectively solves core Web3 problems. Validity roll-ups increase scalability by bundling transactions together off-chain and then verifying them on-chain with just a fraction of the cost.”
A Significant Milestone
The integration between Alchemy and StarkNet is significant because Alchemy customers can now access low-cost StarkNet tools and build services. According to Mike Garland, Alchemy Product Manager, this could significantly drive Web3 app development. Apart from Alchemy, Immutable is also looking to leverage StarkNet in an attempt to make its transaction-heavy operations more affordable for users.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
