Eli Ben-Sasson - Starknet Vision | EDCON2023

Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-Founder of StarkWare, takes the stage at #EDCON2023 and talks about Starknet vision. His talk focuses on the past, present, and future of Starknet. He starts his talk with the future and broadness and what it entails for Starknet. Eli is a mathematician by training and would like to explain very formally what we’re talking about when we talk about broadness and the vision of Starknet. He explains that integrity means doing the right thing even when no one is watching and we need integrity for all the operations that blockchain serves (we need it for money, for NFTs, and for all the things that blockchain supports); social functions are protocols and registries whose value necessitates broad social consensus about their integrity, such as money and social titles; Ethereum and Bitcoin and all the other that are similar to that are examples of integrity webs, which are open-to-all peer-to-peer protocols that implement social functions with no central arbiter, by distributing value to operators, trying that value to the integrity of the system.

Eli also points out there is a tension in broadness, and broadness could be the set of operators that needs to be as big as possible so you want a very minimal barrier of entry to the integrity web, but you also need the broadness in terms of social functions that you can support and scale, so you have the tension between this decentralization and scale, and this tension is what exactly leads to the scalability problem.

So what is Starknet? Eli says Starknet is an integrity web L2 on Ethereum that resolves the broadness tension with math, particularly with STARK validity proofs, and the way Starknet works is that it invites arbitrarily powerful operators to broaden the scale of social functions on Ethereum while monitoring their integrity efficiency on L1. He says within Ethereum right now, we have a lot of integrity, trust, and value that is supported by it, but it has a very limited set of functions and TPS that you can have, so with the help of math, Starknet opens up this to arbitrarily powerful operators that we don’t need to have trust in them and it could do this through fractal scaling and further and further recursive implementations of the same methodology, and the beauty of it all is the math is transitive while the integrity and assurance you get flow transitively from Ethereum’s core of trust all the way out to the operators. That’s what you get with Starknet. Eli says this entails several things that are very important, saying that Starknet must be open and transparent and have a broad & empowered base of operators, leaders, and developers, and cannot allow any one party to control it. He explains that currently, StarkWare is very much influential within Starknet, but according to this vision and principles, this must change and it will change. You can know more about the vision of Starknet via Eli’s presentation at EDCON 2023!

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