L2 Giant StarkWare's Iterative Idea Layer3

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Iterative thinking of Layer2 giant StarkWare: Layer3

For the Layer3 concept, the Layer2 expansion network StarkWare is the earliest evangelist.

Founded in 2018, StarkWare mainly promotes zero-knowledge proof and STARK, the core technology of the proof system, and is committed to improving the scalability and privacy of the blockchain.

StarkWare has moved from project development to technology generalization all the way. It is the development company of the L2 expansion solution StarkEX and the L2 ZK-Rollup solution StarkNet. Its valuation in the D round of financing has reached 8 billion US dollars.

As an L2 expansion giant, StarkWare is progressing smoothly in the direction of scalability, and has turned to a new narrative of "solving privacy".

The concept of Layer3 is still in the development stage, and it mainly revolves around "a layer that is built on the underlying public chain and the middle layer protocol to provide specific services to consumers."

The value of Layer 3 platforms often needs to be valued from the perspective of specific business models and application scenarios through business and charging methods. StarkWare describes the architectural features of L3:

StarkWare's idea is that L2 retains the advantages of decentralization and composability, but some Dapps still have clearer business needs, which will be served by the new independent layer L3.

Taking expansion as an example, the relationship between L3 and L2 can be compared to that between L2 and L1. L2 is used for general expansion, and L3 is used for customized expansion. Exponential growth can be achieved.

The business orientation of this structure is clearer. Some time ago, Vitalik Buterin proposed three visions for L3:

L2 for extensions and L3 for custom features such as privacy

L2 for general scaling, L3 for custom scaling

L2 is used for no trust extension (rollup), L3 is used for weak trust extension (authentication)

This is a good interpretation of the market's understanding of L3 "specialization layering", which is still essentially based on the development trend of "modular blockchain". Under this framework, both StarkWare and Vitalik mentioned that "privacy issues" will be resolved in L3 and L4 by means of "fractal expansion".

"Privacy" is another technical track that is highly dependent on the zero-knowledge proof system. Together with "scaling", it is regarded as "the most suitable application scenario for zero-knowledge proof technology", and it is also an area where StarkWare is good at.

For StarkWare, thanks to its early technology development experience, it has created a complete and mature certification system with STARK as the core technology. Whether STARK technology can become a basic module in the blockchain network is an important issue for StarkWare. business orientation.

StarkWare had rich experience in customizing the proprietary L2 direction in the early stage and was proficient in business logic, and finally created StarkNet, which became a general-purpose L2 product after the expansion technology iteration. So taking the expansion track as an example, StarkWare's next step is likely to create another "L3 privacy" track.

This L3 will be a new independent layer based on StarkNet, possibly the first general-purpose L3 privacy product.

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Primary market investment dynamics

Primary market investment dynamics

A total of 42 financing events in the industry were announced last week, with a total disclosed financing of about US$530 million. Last week, there were a total of 14 investment events with an investment scale of tens of millions of dollars. The heat in the primary market has not faded. The areas that have attracted more attention include security services, data analysis platforms, and infrastructure; the investment projects that are more worthy of attention include fraud detection Platform Sardine ($51.5 million) and games studio Theorycraft Games ($50 million).