Can New Re-Tech Cope With High Ethereum Fees?

The transition to a stock reference has been the focus of Ethereum’s development efforts for much of the past year. Now that the merger has an official target date of around September 15, investors are asking, what comes next?

Blockworks spoke with a developer of Ethereum scaling solutions about the importance of scaling efforts at Layer-2s.

StarkWare announced the new redundancy proof technology during a presentation at the ETH Seoul developer conference last week.

Iterability is a technique used in computer science to create proofs on blockchains. By repeatedly compressing Layer-2 transactions, this process promises to reduce gas charges and improve speed. The method takes multiple zero-knowledge proofs that have already been compressed once and then compressed again and again faster.

Another up and coming role blockchain is based around this same idea.

Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of StarkWare, gave the example of multiple checkout lines in a supermarket. Instead of all customers waiting in line to buy their groceries at a single cashier, customers can shop at different checkout counters at once.

Similarly, when it comes to transactions on Ethereum, instead of all transactions waiting for a prover, several provers work in parallel. With repeated authentications, multiple transactions are processed simultaneously, all compressed into a single proof. This will reduce the delay.

Repetition can increase the processing capacity of NFTs.

According to Ben-Sasson, NFTs are one example of how Ethereum’s recurring transaction capabilities can be leveraged.

“We now have the ability to match tens of millions of NFTs. [non-fungible token] Mint to one repeatable proof, and therefore to one Ethereum transaction,” says Ben-Sasson, adding that the technology is working to “prevent the bottleneck of tomorrow”.

Gideon Kampfer, Starkware’s head of core engineering, offered another example: “It’s like finding a way to comfortably fit thousands of passengers into a jet instead of a few hundred.”

The result is that “many millions” of NFTs on Ethereum are wrapped in a single STARK proof, he added.

NFTs are notoriously gassy, ​​and one of the promises of recurring proofs is to allow more transactions in each STARK proof written to the Ethereum mainnet, reducing gas costs per transaction.

When asked if blockchain networks and validators could still make money and sustain themselves with low gas fees, Ben Sasson said, “Absolutely.”

“What we’re seeing now on blockchain is a fraction of the traffic we’ll see in the future,” he said.

The most significant by a wide margin are the gas slush DEXes, namely Uniswap. According to data from Nansen, Uniswap uses the most ether every day and accounts for 37 percent of the gas they use.

StarWare says redundancy can “significantly” reduce fees associated with DEXes (decentralized exchanges). It can also reduce issues related to Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) or Miner Extractable Value – as it was known before the merger – by referring to Ethereum miners who can make additional profits by organizing transactions in blocks.

Another concern on the minds of consumers in the post-merger world is privacy and the risk of hacking. According to Ben-Sasson, using the Starkware approach, privacy and security come together as a package. “From a security standpoint, it’s exactly the same,” he said.

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