STARKs finally faces its next challenge. Now, STARKs will demonstrate its scaling advantages on the most egalitarian currency ever created - Bitcoin. Once OP_CAT is adopted on Bitcoin, deploying STARK validators in Bitcoin Script will become a reality. This opens a path for secure, self-hosted transfers between Bitcoin and Starknet, creating a L2 that scales both Ethereum and Bitcoin.
The power of cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrency can cleanse the digital and financial world. It can bring integrity to money, rebalance power in our society, and take power away from big tech companies and back to sovereign individuals. It is a tool to empower human beings and grassroots communities. In short, it is a source of beauty. So we need a vision that shows this and is relevant to everyone. To realize this vision, I left a quiet academic career. Such a vision would not be complete without extending the launch chain of this fantastic project. We scale Bitcoin and unleash the power of blockchain to change the world.
StarkWare Support and Cooperation
StarkWare is supporting this initiative with practical measures and has launched a $1 million fund to support new research that will reveal the pros and cons of adopting OP_CAT on Bitcoin. We formed a highly productive strategic partnership with Weikeng Chen of L2 Iterative Ventures (L2IV) through the ZeroSync Foundation, which ultimately led to the birth of Bitcoin Wildlife Sanctuary. We leverage their team’s hands-on approach to engineering and research to push the boundaries of open source efforts to deploy OP_CAT-based contracts and STARK validators in Bitcoin Script.
2008: The moment of rupture
Let’s go back to 2008, when global finance just collapsed. In response, Satoshi Nakamoto published the revolutionary Bitcoin white paper. In this moment of rupture, Satoshi showed us how to do things differently. As a public, we can demand and enforce higher standards of integrity and transparency in finance. Rather than relying on the bastions of traditional banks, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced an inclusive protocol that invited everyone to join. The protocol distributes value fairly and transparently to contributors broadly through Bitcoin mining and fees. The wider the distribution of contributors, the better and more secure Bitcoin becomes.
Bitcoin’s influence
Bitcoin gives us more than just a ledger—it gives us the belief in change. It gives us faith just when the banks are screwing everything up - by then they're busy repossessing homes and hoping we don't even realize that despite all the mortgage lenders' "believe us" gestures , but even home is not “safe as home.” Bitcoin’s impact, if fully realized, could be far more profound than what we see today. It can and should be used extensively as a global reserve currency. It could form the basis of a global “integrity web” that underpins all the social functions our free society needs: money, property rights management and social interaction.
The potential of Bitcoin payments
The Bitcoin white paper envisions a practical network for payments that can be operated by everyone, regardless of size, rich or poor, strong or weak. Today, 1.5 billion people around the world don’t even have a bank account. Bitcoin payments are not just an option for these people, but are actually the medium through which they first encounter financial infrastructure. Today, the capacity provided by Bitcoin is too small, and the available capacity is too expensive for these 1.5 billion people. I hope to develop a technology that allows everyone to use Bitcoin and join the free society that Bitcoin sustains.
important but overlooked issues
Some people think of StarkWare as Ethereum maxis. While we are aligned with Ethereum's values and committed to Ethereum's success, we are STARK maxis first. Starknet is deployed on Ethereum as an L2, and connecting Starknet to Bitcoin is also a natural extension of its functional features. This is consistent with our vision since founding StarkWare that STARKs are public goods and are used to scale all truly decentralized blockchain projects.
StarkWare’s connection to Bitcoin
StarkWare has deployed all of its systems on Ethereum. But the STARK extension to the blockchain was an idea proposed at the Bitcoin Conference in the spring of 2013. At the conference, I took to the podium and spoke about my initial research into a type of cryptographic proofs that came to be known as STARKs, and many in the audience responded that this kind of cryptographic research was exactly what blockchain needed. In other words, I became interested in Bitcoin two years before Ethereum came out. Therefore, StarkWare has been closely associated with Bitcoin from the beginning, and we have always observed the Bitcoin network with admiration.
The potential of Taproot and OP_CAT
Taproot, and perhaps OP_CAT, have expanded the possibilities of Bitcoin to the point where I can now feel comfortable discussing it openly. We've also supported groundbreaking Bitcoin projects like ZeroSync, which was the first to integrate ZK proofs with Bitcoin for enhanced privacy and scalability. StarkWare also commissioned a report called "Bitcoin Network Validity Rollup" from researcher John Light, which re-evaluated the possibility of integrating existing validity rollups with Bitcoin, concluding that there could be one An ideal match.
future outlook
My dream is to see Bitcoin reach the scale it needs to reach, continually working for everyone. This includes open participation to everyone, with no financial barriers to entry. I believe that as long as we firmly adhere to Satoshi Nakamoto’s insistence on decentralization and security, this dream will surely come true. The Internet began as a niche playground for nerdy engineers and academics. It took several years to expand it and finally turn it into the infrastructure of our lives. Blockchain is a tool that can democratize the Internet and rebalance power by distributing trust and integrity to a large community of sovereign individuals, rather than delegating it to a few large corporations. But to truly seize power and return it to the masses, scale is needed.
Bitcoin privacy protection
I also believe that the opportunity of Bitcoin scaling should be seized to advance a value that is important to many in the Bitcoin community: privacy protection. The cryptography that can provide Bitcoin with scalability also provides the raw material for enhanced privacy features. In time, you will have it all: your keys, your coins, your privacy.