StarkEx 3.0 now live on Mainnet

Empower L2 users to easily interact with L1

TL;DR

• StarkEx 3.0 is live on Mainnet
• Main features: L1 Vaults & SHARP (SHARed Prover)
• L1 Vaults: Ethereum addresses (specifically, smart contracts) can now trade with StarkEx’s users by owning an L1 Vault — enabling DeFi Pooling & dAMM (formerly Caspian)
• A new batch-long-flash-loan capability improves the Operator’s capital efficiency in the dAMM flow
• SHARP: a single STARK proof for multiple independent dApps => lower gas/tx for all users

Main Features

1. StarkEx L1 Vaults

StarkEx 3.0 is the latest release of StarkEx, StarkWare’s scalability engine. It is now live on Ethereum Mainnet, supporting seamless interaction flows with Ethereum L1.

For the first time, Ethereum smart contracts can be the owners of assets on StarkEx, and trade these assets via L1 Vaults with L2 users. This provides a low-cost mechanism for StarkEx (L2) users to interact with external logic (and liquidity) found on L1.

Why is this a novelty? Up until now, users had to choose: either participate in the scalable L2 environment or participate in L1 strategies — such as supply liquidity to an AMM or a yVault. Now users can do both; with the same funds and without having to pay for expensive deposits to L2 and withdrawals back to L1.

StarkEx L1 Vaults allow smart contracts to:

• Deposit funds to any Ethereum address
• Publish limit-orders relating to these funds
• Withdraw these funds

Potential Use-cases

DeFi Pooling: DeFi strategy contracts can own an L1 Vault. This allows StarkEx users to easily and inexpensively participate in DeFi strategies, such as lending money on Aave/Compound, investing in YFI, etc. The cost to the user of participating in an L1 strategy is significantly lower in StarkEx than doing so directly from L1 — enabling small accounts the chance to participate for the first time. Find a deep dive explanation of this use case here.

We are currently building a DeFi-pooling platform, together with Celer.

dAMM: In the dAMM (decentralized-AMM) design, the Operator can deliver a scalable AMM operation on L2 while providing additional yields to LPs, thanks to the liquidity remaining on L1. Furthermore, a new feature of batch-long-flash-loans enables this without a liquidity requirement from the Operator.

A Note on Optimistic Rollups

You may ask: isn’t all this achievable on Optimistic Rollups as well?
The week-long finality time of Optimistic Rollups prohibits a seamless interaction with L1. Thus, an owner of an L1 Vault is required to wait a week between their L1 declaration of intent until the trade with the L2 ecosystem is completed and confirmed. Yes, they can use Liquidity Providers to speed up the process, but at the cost of increased fees. In comparison, finality time in StarkEx is measured in hours and predicted to become even faster thanks to SHARP.

2. SHARP

SHARP (SHARed Prover) collects batches from several StarkEx-powered applications before packing them into one proof. Thanks to SHARP, StarkEx offers significantly better gas usage per transaction and faster finality time, even for low bandwidth applications.

Our Roadmap

The first StarkEx release was deployed on Mainnet just over a year ago, and what a year it’s been! Prior to V3.0, StarkEx already supported transfers, spot-trading, conditional transfers, perpetual trading, and minting & trading of NFTs. We are already busy developing more features, including seamless onboarding and enhanced interoperability.

All this goodness can easily be ported to StarkNet, a permissionless decentralized ZK-Rollup. StarkNet Planets Alpha is already live on Ropsten — where it is being extended frequently (e.g., Alpha 1).