Announcing Hashstack's migration to Starkware's zk-Rollup solution- Starknet.

Hashstack is thrilled to announce its strategic shift to Starkware developed Starknet — the first general purpose permissionless Decentralized ZK-Rollup, to deploy Open — Hashstack’s money-market protocol to enable secure, under-collateralised loans on the blockchain. With this, Hashstack shifts its focus from EVM chains to zk-primitives to further its mission to build critical infrastructure necessary to 10x the usability of decentralised finance, to truly empower financial inclusion through crypto.

What are Zk-Rollups, why are they needed?

Ethereum is the most popular blockchain development platform. 26.65% of all Dapps in existence are deployed on Ethereum. Today, 9 out of 10 dapps get deployed on Ethereum, or evm based L1. This is primarily due to lower development barriers, & matured ecosystem of developers, resources. On the flipside the increased network load consistently leads to exorbitant gas fees, slower transaction times; which greatly impacts the network’s scalability.

This matters because, blockchain has made significant strides over the past few years with a projected CAGR of 56.3% between 2022 to 2029. This might not be possible if the predicaments of today continue to exist.

L2 scalability protocols such as zk-Rollups operate by rolling up hundreds of offchain transactions into a single transaction. They return a short non-interactive argument of knowledge(SNARK) to the main-chain as a proof of validity. This ensures that instead of hefty transaction data, only the validity proof has to be kept on the main Ethereum network, making ZK Rollups a faster and cheaper way to confirm transactions.

StarkNet is a permissionless decentralized ZK-Rollup operating as an L2 network over Ethereum, where any dApp can achieve unlimited scale for its computation, without compromising Ethereum’s composability and security.

Why Starknet?

1. Future-ready: In development since 2017, Starknet’s one of the few market-ready zk-rollups with over 205Mn transactions processed, facilitating over US $657Bn trading volume, to date; instilling confidence on the network’s reliablity.
2. The community: Arguably the most collaborative ecosystem of buidlers we have come across. Adopting an entirely new development framework comes up with its own set of challenges. Starkware team’s success in building an open minded, collaboration-centric community made it 10x easier for Hashstack’s team to evaluate & deploy on Starknet. Additionally, Starkware incentivised Hashstack for building & deploying on Starknet.
3. Cairo: Starknet’s virtual machine is powered by Cairo. It is a turing complete language with syntax being similar to Python. In comparison to Solidity, Cairo is less restrictive & provides full low-level access to low-level primitives.

About Hashstack: Hashstack builds critical infrastructure necessary to further the usability of decentralised finance.

Open: Hashstack’s solution to the over-collateralisation problem in defi lending —  Open is a non-custodial, zk-native money-market protocol designed to enable secure under-collateralised loans on-chain.