Original title: Scaling Bitcoin for mass use: a realistic vision
Original author: Eli Ben-Sasson
Compiled by: Odaily Planet Daily Husband
Starknet will be the first network to settle on both Bitcoin and Ethereum, and will scale Bitcoin’s transaction processing capacity to thousands of transactions per second. This will be possible within six months of a modest upgrade to Bitcoin, made possible by OP_CAT. This is my proposal for the future of Starknet, and for blockchain, the global economy, and our individual rights. We have already taken concrete steps to this end, as detailed below.
The time has finally come for STARKs to take on a new challenge. Now, STARKs will demonstrate their ability to scale on the most egalitarian currency ever created: Bitcoin. And by scaling, I mean truly decentralized scaling. I’m not here to create another multi-signature sidechain, I’m here to create a layer that can scale both Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Crypto can cleanse the digital world and the financial sector. It can bring integrity to money, rebalance power in society, take it away from big tech companies and return it to sovereign individuals. It is a tool to empower humanity and grassroots communities. In short, it is a source of good. Therefore, we need a vision that demonstrates this and is relevant to everyone. In pursuit of this vision, I bid farewell to a quiet academic career.
Such a vision would not be complete without scaling the BTC chain. By scaling Bitcoin, we can unleash the power of blockchain to change the world. StarkWare is supporting this vision through practical development and has launched a $1 million fund to support new research that will reveal the pros and cons of adopting OP_CAT on Bitcoin.
Our strategic partnership with Weikeng Chen of L2 Iterative Ventures (L2 IV) through the ZeroSync Foundation has been extremely fruitful. We have leveraged his team’s hands-on approach to engineering and research expertise to continue to push the boundaries on open source work on OP-CAT based contracts and STARK validators implemented in Bitcoin Script. We are also grateful to BitVM and the ZeroSync Foundation for opening up many minds to what is possible with Bitcoin. Carter Feldman of QED has also been helpful; showing what can be discovered by looking at Taproot with a new perspective and an open mind.
There will be a ton of official updates from StarkWare and Starknet following this post, but for now I want to get back to basics and lay out why we’re doing what we’re doing.
The Broken Year of 2008
In 2008, the global financial system collapsed. In response, Satoshi Nakamoto released the revolutionary Bitcoin whitepaper. In this moment of fracture, Satoshi showed us how to do things differently. We, the public, can demand and enforce higher standards of integrity and transparency in finance. Rather than relying on the fortresses and skyscrapers of traditional banks, Satoshi introduced an inclusive protocol that invites everyone to participate and contribute. Through Bitcoin mining and fees, this protocol distributes value fairly and transparently to a broad base of contributors. The broader the contributor base, the better and more secure Bitcoin will be.
Bitcoin gives us more than just a ledger — it gives us confidence in change. And it does this at a time when banks are screwing up, and are busy repossessing homes, hoping that none of us realize that even homes are no longer “safe” despite all the mortgage lenders saying “trust us.”
Bitcoins impact, if fully realized, could even transcend the reality we see today. Its destiny should and should be mass adoption as a global reserve. It could form the basis of a global trust network that supports all the social functions we need for a free society: currency, property management, and social interaction.
The Bitcoin whitepaper envisioned a network that is actually used for payments, big or small, and operated by everyone, rich or poor. Today, there are 1.5 billion people in the world who dont even have a bank account. For these people, Bitcoin payments are not just an alternative, but actually their first exposure to financial infrastructure. Bitcoin today offers too little capacity, and the existing capacity is too expensive for almost all of these 1.5 billion people. I am motivated to develop technology that makes Bitcoin, and the free society it supports, accessible to everyone.
Origin of Bitcoin
Some people think StarkWare is an Ethereum fanatic. While we share the value of Ethereum and are committed to its success, we are STARK fans first and foremost. As a layer 2 on Ethereum, connecting Starknet to Bitcoin is also a natural extension of its feature set. This is consistent with the vision we have held since founding StarkWare, that STARKs are a public good that will be required to scale all truly decentralized blockchain projects.
Bringing ZK-STARKs to Bitcoin is not a departure from our path, but a full-circle return. So far, all StarkWare systems have been deployed only on Ethereum. But the idea of STARK extensions for blockchains originated at a Bitcoin conference in the spring of 2013.
At the conference , I took the stage and told about my nascent and somewhat eccentric cryptographic research, which became known as STARKs, and many in the audience responded that this cryptographic research was exactly what blockchain needed. In other words, I was “inspired” by Bitcoin two years before Ethereum launched.
StarkWare has therefore been deeply connected to Bitcoin since the beginning and we have been watching the network with admiration. Now, I am comfortable with shaping what is possible for Bitcoin with the advent of Taproot and the potential implementation of OP_CAT.
We have also supported groundbreaking Bitcoin projects such as ZeroSync, which pioneered the integration of ZK proofs with Bitcoin to enhance privacy and scalability. StarkWare also commissioned researcher John Light to write the report Validity Rollups on Bitcoin, which re-evaluated the potential of integrating existing validity rollups with Bitcoin and concluded that there may be an ideal match. Our next generation circle-stark prover-verifier, Stwo, works on the finite field M 31. This field works well with Bitcoin Script, making us well suited to provide the next generation of Bitcoin scaling solutions.
The future we hope to see
My dream is to see Bitcoin reach the scale it needs to serve everyone. This involves opening up participation to everyone without economic barriers. I believe this must adhere to Satoshis commitment to decentralization and security.
The internet started out as a niche place for nerdy engineers and academics to play. Over the years, it expanded to become the infrastructure that runs our lives. Blockchain is a tool that runs on top of the internet and can democratize the internet, rebalancing power by distributing trust and integrity to large communities of sovereign individuals, rather than delegating it to a few large companies. But to truly take power away and bring it back to the masses, it needs to scale.
I also believe that the opportunity to scale Bitcoin should be used to advance a value that many in the Bitcoin community hold dear: privacy. The same cryptography that not only powers Bitcoin’s scalability, but also provides the raw materials for enhanced privacy capabilities. Over time, we’ll see that you can own it all: your private keys, your coins, your privacy.
How do we achieve this?
StarkWare is currently taking three concrete steps to enable Bitcoin to scale:
First, we will propose a new Starknet design by making Starknet the first Layer 2 that settles on both Ethereum and Bitcoin. Our team will conduct or sponsor all the necessary work to transform Starknet into a self-hosted decentralized Layer 2, fully functional on Bitcoin, while running as a Layer 2 on Ethereum. Details of the architecture we are working on will be announced in the coming weeks.
Second, StarkWare will launch a $1 million fund to provide grants to Bitcoin researchers and developers who study OP_CAT and its impact. The funds will be awarded to individuals and projects that sincerely support or oppose the upgrade and provide proof of concept for the use of OP_CAT. Details about this fund will be announced next week.
Finally, we believe that the OP_CAT Bitcoin soft fork is the safest path for Bitcoin to scale, especially to enable Stark validation and Rollups. Therefore, we are announcing public support for OP_CAT. OP_CAT makes trustless Rollups possible on Bitcoin by enabling recursive contracts that can autonomously manage and update their state, thereby significantly increasing transaction throughput without overloading Bitcoin.
If you would like to discuss StarkWare expansion into the Bitcoin network, please contact us via email or join the discussion on X.
What does scaling Bitcoin unlock?
By scaling Bitcoin, we will be able to process transactions for millions of users in one second, rather than today’s approximately thirteen transactions per second. Some of the use cases we envision internally for Bitcoin after scaling include:
Scaling Bitcoin and Ethereum at the same time: The current blockchain is fragmented. You can choose Bitcoin, the digital gold that stores value but has limited uses; or Ethereum, which wants to be the world computer; or Starknet will manage them in fragments by cross-chaining smaller chains (DApps can choose one or both). It will scale both without interfering with the independent governance of either chain.
Privacy: STARKs, the cryptographic proofs that will be used in the scaling process, have huge privacy potential built in that has yet to be realized. The privacy potential is a natural fit for the Bitcoin community. The “zero knowledge” side of the technology is well understood but still needs to be unlocked and turned into practical solutions. Integrating a private Layer 2 into the Bitcoin ecosystem, leveraging technologies like Zcash, MimbleWimble, or Noir, can significantly enhance transaction privacy.
Providing Financial Services to the Excluded: Bitcoin’s mission has been, in part, to empower the underprivileged. Approximately 1.5 billion people worldwide lack access to traditional banking services, a huge barrier to financial upswing. Other attempts to scale Bitcoin have yet to provide a solution for mass use. With new scaling methods and added tools, Bitcoin has the potential to provide an inclusive global financial system for the world’s unbanked.
Financial innovation of Bitcoin: Todays Bitcoin supports digital cash payments, but the modern market needs more: better self-custody options, including programmable margin vaults, risk management and hedging tools, credit, loans, derivatives, futures contracts, etc. These all require more features that cannot and should not be built directly on Bitcoin. But Starknet can provide the best of both worlds as a Layer 2 on Bitcoin: backed by the security of Bitcoin as digital gold, bringing huge financial innovations.
Improved user experience: Bitcoin’s original self-custodial security also makes it difficult to deal with securely, especially from the perspective of the average user. Modern Layer 2 will provide users with secure and simple self-custodial interactions for most of their daily needs, while relying on Bitcoin’s strong but cumbersome Layer 1 security as a long-term store of value.
Why STARKs and Starknet?
In short, STARKs provide the largest scale, most battle-tested, most secure “toxic waste” that does not require a trusted setup, does not require exotic cryptographic primitives, and is even secure against post-quantum computing. The new STARK prover-verifier, called Stwo, uses tiny numbers that fit into the Bitcoin stack, making it more efficient.
Starknet already has a vibrant developer community on Ethereum, and a fully functional programming language. Cairo, Starknet’s native (and open source) language, will look very familiar to any developer familiar with Rust. The Bitcoin community today does not have an obvious high-level language for building the world of on-chain activity. I hope Cairo can fill that void and become one of Bitcoin’s native languages.
Conclusion
This is a global initiative and we want to hear feedback from around the world - if you have any ideas please share them with our team via email or Twitter/X.
