StarkWare has published an official blog post to announce that it is going to open source StarkNet Provider under an Apache 2.0 license with the objective of boosting collaboration and increasing accessibility to developers in the community.
Calling it a milestone in the evolution, StarkWare has said that the move will allow innovation in the tech stack while bringing several benefits to the ecosystem. The open-source process will be said to have been completed once the Prover is placed under the said license. However, it is scheduled only for the final phase of the decentralization process.
Members of the community will gain another benefit of independently reviewing the code and pitching developments to the team. They will simultaneously be able to look for bugs and report the same to the core team, which can then improve the quality. This is bound to provide transparency along with the genuine path of development.
Assuming things go as per the plan, there would be nothing stopping Starknet from achieving its full potential through the values added by the members.
What makes the open-sourcing process one of the safest bets is the fact that it is based on the Prover that has been in use since June 2020. It has so far settled $824 billion by executing over 327 million transactions. Almost 95 million non-fungible tokens have been minted through the Prover.
Making Starknet Prover open-source is in line with the mission that was set at the time of the launch of Starknet Alpha in November 2021. The aim has always been to enable the community to own the network. It follows the completion of the open-source process of Sequencer, Cairo 1.0, and
Papyrus Full Node.StarkWare, in the blog post, has expressed excitement with the announcement of making StarkNet Prover available under Apache 2.0 at the earliest, making it appropriate for decentralized and permissionless Layer 2 networks.
The announcement for Cairo 1.0 – Alpha.2 was made at the end of January 2023. It was announced that the team would bring a lot of new features to the table. One of the major highlights of the announcement was that it is now possible to implement the ERC20 contract.
Other new features for Cairo 1.0 – Alpha.2 announced are as follows:
- Events in contract
- Dictionaries
- Trait support
- Mapping storage variables
- Methods
- Type interference
A clear timeline is yet to be shared; however, it has been suggested to developers that they must start using Cairo 1.0 to stay a step ahead by familiarizing themselves with it.
The announcement for open-sourcing Papyrus was made much before the time when the announcement for Cairo 1.0 was made. It was announced while also stating the objective that it will serve as a key component in the decentralized StarkNet infrastructure.
Starknet Prover getting open-sourced gives a boost to the developers’ community. Individual contributions to quality improvement are only one more announcement away.