Starknet To Roll Out Suite Of Fee-Saving Measures Alongside Dencun – The Defiant

Starknet, a leading Ethereum Layer 2, will introduce upgrades designed to significantly reduce transaction fees alongside Ethereum’s long-awaited Dencun upgrade.

Announced on March 12, Starknet will implement a wave of fee-saving measures in parallel to Ethereum’s March 13 Dencun upgrade through its 0.13.1 version. The Starknet Foundation said the new version will “dramatically reduce” transaction fees on the network by driving down the “data availability costs, fixed costs, and marginal costs” associated with Starknet transactions.

Starknet estimates the upgrades will double the fee savings expected to be unlocked through Dencun. While not all of the fee optimizations will be deployed on March 13, the Starknet Foundation will begin subsidizing the difference between current fees and their expected price once all of the upgrades have been activated in the future.

“To cut user fees even earlier, the Starknet Foundation is introducing its early fee-reduction effort, which aims to implement expected results of this long-term vision as early as possible,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, StarkWare’s CEO. “As part of the program, the Foundation will provide tokens to adjust transaction fees to match conservative estimates of future network fees when decentralization takes effect.”

The new measures also follow Starknet ushering in a 50% reduction in computation costs and a 25% drop in data availability expenses with the launch of its v0.13.0 upgrade in January.

Starknet is the fifth-largest Layer 2 network with a total value locked (TVL) of $1.66 billion, according to L2beat.

Dencun

The highly-anticipated Dencun upgrade is set to significantly reduce the fees associated with transacting on Layer 2. EIP-4844 or proto-danksharding, the main Ethereum Improvement Proposal included in Dencun, will dramatically improve data availability by replacing gas-intensive calldata with Binary Large Objects (blobs), which do not compete with Ethereum transactions for gas.

Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, said that Starknet users will enjoy a greater fee reduction post-Dencun than any other Layer 2. “This is because Starknet fees have the highest proportion of data availability costs, where the savings are being made,” Oliva said.

According to data from IntoTheBlock, decentralized exchange swaps on Arbitrum and Optimism, the two largest Layer 2s, will fall by 80% following Dencun.

Sharpening Starknet

The 0.13.1 version upgrade also includes measures bolstering the efficiency of Starknet’s shared prover, SHARP, which uses recursive proving to aggregate multiple proofs in batches called “trains.”

StarkWare said it is introducing a new hash system underpinning its SHARP infrastructure, likening the move to “upgrading a train network’s signaling system to deliver a major efficiency boost.” The upgrade will also begin a gradual increase in the size of SHARP’s trains.

“More transactions will ‘board’ each ‘train’, and just as this would increase the efficiency of a subway system, it will increase Starknet’s efficiency,” said Sasson.

StarkWare said it will also reduce data availability and fixed costs by improving the efficiency of data compression and transaction arranging for SHARP before Q4, and by introducing recursive proof compression by 2025.

StarkWare will further reduce fees in late 2024 or early 2025 by introducing Volition, which will cut fees further by allowing developers to choose whether their data is stored on-chain or off-chain.