The decentralized autonomous organization for Starknet, a layer-2 blockchain built on Ethereum, started voting Thursday on whether to approve its latest protocol upgrade for mainnet deployment.
The vote ends on Jan. 8 at 12 p.m. UTC and at press time, all votes cast have been in favor of deploying Starknet Alpha v0.13.0.
The upgrade has two key elements: substantially reducing transaction fees and laying the groundwork for users to use Starknet’s native token STRK as payments for their gas consumption, according to a community forum post.
The deployment would be an exciting new step for the layer-2 blockchain, Carlos Mercado, a data scientist at blockchain analytics firm Flipside Crypto, said to Unchained over Telegram, but noted that the vote “is mostly symbolic.” The upgrade “is a closed vote, as the STRK token launched in 2022 and only has around 430 holders (per Etherscan), many of which are delegating to key ecosystem players.”
The vote comes less than a month after Starknet deployed the upgrade on the Goerli and Sepolia testnets. The total value locked in Starknet’s smart contracts currently stands at $141 million, according to data from layer-2 watchdog, L2Beat.
Starknet is a rollup designed to scale the Ethereum blockchain without compromising on security and composability. It uses zero-knowledge proofs, which are “cryptographic proofs that verify data without revealing any information about the data itself,” wrote head of research Christine Kim in a Galaxy report.
“The crypto space is at the frontier of very powerful technologies like zero-knowledge proofs,” wrote Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in a Dec. 28 blog post. “Zero-knowledge proofs, a technology we thought was decades away, are now here, are increasingly developer-friendly, and are on the cusp of being usable for consumer applications.”
