Stephanie Douse 
StarkNet aspires to stimulate developers’ inventiveness and to lead the Layer 2 building boom.
Since its November launch on the Ethereum Mainnet, StarkNet, the Layer-2 scaling solution created by Ethereum protocol StarkWare, has announced that the first few decentralized apps, or dApps, built on the platform have been deployed.
Starkware shared the nine projects listed by zkRollups, a digital directory for the zero-knowledge ecosystem, in a Twitter thread now that the company has established all of the infrastructure needed for dApps to launch.
Decentralized finance (DeFi), nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and gaming applications are all on the list.
StarkNet is a permissionless validity rollup, also known as a zero-knowledge rollup, that leverages simple compression techniques to improve Ethereum Layer 1’s production and security.
The corporation boasts that its goods have “rock-bottom” gas fees, transaction costs, and “unlimited” scaling potential.
Uri Kolodny and Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founders of StarkWare, spoke with Coinscreed.
“If you compare WeChat and WhatsApp and Facebook, they’re used by hundreds of millions of billions of people. There is nothing in crypto today that serves billions of people. And part of the reason is the limited scale.”
Ben-Sasson discusses the essential missing step in bringing crypto into the mainstream.
Kolodny then made a parallel between Manhattan’s skyscrapers, which allowed for greater population expansion, and StarkNet’s ability to do the same for Ethereum’s user base.
Layer 2 solutions, such as StarkNet, will be “critical” in serving a “huge anticipated surge” in blockchain use, he noted.
The StarkNet platform, according to Ben-Sasson, is “the missing link in tech evolution” that “makes blockchain usable for everything” and will “propel us to a Web3 reality.”
StarkNet will be entirely decentralized within the next year, according to the founders.
StarkWare just raised $50 million in a Series C fundraising round, bringing the company’s valuation to $2 billion.
On Wednesday, the Opera web browser announced its partnership with DeversiFi, a Starkware-powered Ethereum Layer-2 exchange that seeks to deliver cost- and time-efficient transactions within the mobile browser wallet.