Eli Ben-Sasson, Uri Kolodny and Will Harborne: A STARK Powered DEX Capable of 9,000 TPS

Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to Uri Kolodny and Eli Ben Sasson of StarkWare, and Will Harborne from DeversiFi. They discuss the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized exchanges, the development of Layer 2 technologies, scalability, and more.

Episode Highlights:

• StarkWare is an Israeli startup that develops proof systems for scalability, security, and permissions for blockchain.
• DeversiFi is a decentralized exchange that allows people to connect to any Ethereum wallet and can reach up to 9,000 TPS.
• DeversiFi is now working to scale up beyond Ethereum to its own centralized exchange, and is using StarkWare technology to do that.
• The biggest benefit of having all the benefits of a decentralized exchange operating on a centralized exchange is a higher number of trades per second.
• Starks are a type of zero-knowledge proof system with extreme scalability and transparency that rely on a lot of complex mathematics behind the scenes.
• What this technology results in is essentially a receipt for your transaction, a guarantee that your trade was handled correctly and that there was computational integrity.
• There are differences between Snarks and Starks—Starks have no trusted setup and have post-quantum security.
• When you want to scale, you don’t want a trusted setup limiting you to generating new sets of keys but allows you to operate more universally.
• It’s a plausible security threat that eventually hackers will be able to breach coins and blockchains that are not post-quantum secured.
• Adding zero-knowledge to the settlement process doesn’t automatically give you privacy, so they’re working on boosting those privacy demands.
• Pure centralized exchange technology is rapidly becoming a commodity, including cloud-based services.
• They are starting to look at non-fungible tokens.

Key Points:

1. In terms of scalability, the next step is to have all the security benefits of a decentralized exchange with the speed of a centralized exchange.
2. Centralized exchanges will always be needed for simple retail exchanges.
3. This partnership is one of the first Layer 2 scaling technologies being used to power an existing business model.

Tweetable Quotes

• “We all believe that this technology of zero-knowledge proofs is going to be used someday by even the most powerful of monopolies or governments to attest to the citizens that everything has been done with computational integrity.” –Eli Ben Sasson

• “I think the fiat on-ramp is naturally the hardest thing to decentralize if it can be at all.” –Will
• “Our scalability can basically be considered a means of saving the application gas cost on Ethereum and allowing it to scale essentially indefinitely. Think of us as a compression service.” –Uri Kolodny

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