Under the hood of StarkWare

Scalability has been one of the most debated topics for the blockchain landscape. There are alternative consensus algorithms to address scalability at the base layer, as well as novel implementations of existing technologies, such as sharding mechanisms. Then, there are sidechains and build-on-top solutions. For instance, the Polygon sidechain, as well as rollups, such as Optimism and StarkWare, which is the focus of this article.

Rollups inherit all security assumptions and consensus protocols from the main layer, which make them slightly more advantageous than most other scaling solutions. In essence, rollups batch a number of transactions, compute them off-chain and post a single batch as an on-chain transaction. There are currently two main types of rollups: optimistic rollups, which assume that rollup’s transactions are valid until proven otherwise; and ZK rollups, which only allow a batch of transactions to be posted, if and only if all transactions in it are valid.