StarkWare & Immutable

Bringing StarkEx Scalability Engine to the NFT Space

We are excited to announce our most recent collaboration: we are teaming up with the Immutable team, creators of Gods Unchained. This new partnership will bring StarkEx, StarkWare’s scalability engine, into the blockchain gaming and NFT space.

Gods Unchained, Immutable’s premier game, is an unprecedented success in the blockchain gaming ecosystem. It generated almost $6M revenue while still in Beta, and topped the NFT charts within 24 hours of its marketplace launch.

But on Ethereum, success comes with a challenge: Ethereum’s native throughput ceiling of 4 trades/second limits any application that wishes to scale. For NFTs, the throughput bottleneck is even greater than for fungible tokens: with NFTs, a thousand tokens actually consume a thousandfold more of the blockchain’s resources than a single token. As Gods Unchained gained more traction, the lack of scalability became an impediment to growth.

Immutable searched for a solution allowing for massive scaling of trustless non-custodial trading and minting, They wanted an Ethereum-native solution to enjoy Ethereum’s security, developer tools, and network effect. Our StarkEx solution offered them:

Functionality

• StarkEx was built from the ground up to support both ERC-20 and ERC-721
• StarkEx can support both trading and minting of NFTs. The large-scale and inexpensive trustless off-chain minting of NFTs is an important capability for any NFT game developer.

Scale

• StarkEx has already demonstrated a rate of over 9K non-custodial trades/second.

Trustless

• STARKs lack of trusted setup allows Immutable to remain true to the trustless ethos of permissionless blockchains

Reliability

• Over the past couple of months, StarkWare has been settling millions of trades/week on an Ethereum public testnet. Our Mainnet launch of a first StarkEx system is imminent: it will power DeversiFi’s non-custodial cryptocurrency exchange, and will allow it to trade non-custodially on Bitfinex’s liquidity pool.

Security

• StarkEx was recently audited by PeckShield

We will be working together with Immutable over the next few months to integrate StarkEx into Immutable’s platform, with an expected launch date of Q3 2020. First, supporting trading in in-game assets, and then adding support for off-chain minting of assets. In the future, we plan to use STARKs in order to prove the integrity of any game logic computed off-chain.

We believe the opportunity to bring StarkEx capabilities to the NFT, gaming, and collectibles space has immense potential.

Stay tuned for more exciting news — follow us on Twitter and Medium for updates!