StarkWare Claims Unrivaled Throughput Following ‘Quantum Leap’ Upgrade

StarkWare, an Ethereum scaling team, deployed the Quantum Leap upgrade for its StarkNet Layer 2 network on July 12.

StarkWare said Quantum Leap consistently produced a throughput of 37 transactions per second (TPS) during its public testnet, with peaks of 90 TPS. Latency for transaction inclusion also routinely fell below 10 seconds, significantly beating StarkWare’s target of 15 seconds, which is on par with the Ethereum mainnet.

“The combination of more throughput and faster inclusion means Quantum Leap will pave the way for faster DeFi applications, the creation of realistic triple-A games, and the availability of more consumer services on a Web3 technology stack,” said Uri Kolodny, StarkWare’s co-founder and CEO.

Quantum Leap’s mainnet deployment followed eight days of testnet activity and a governance proposal that passed with 97.9% support.

Zero-Knowledge Pioneer

StarkNet was a pioneering Layer 2 network leveraging zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs when its mainnet rollout began in late 2021.

Today, many of Ethereum’s top scaling teams have also converged on zero-knowledge technology, with zkSync, Polygon, and Consensys each launching so-called “zkEVM” rollups in recent months. zkEVMs are Layer 2s secured using zero-knowledge proofs that also support code written for Ethereum’s smart contract engine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

However, unlike its fresh-faced competitors, StarkNet is not EVM-compatible, meaning dApp and protocol developers operating on Ethereum need to recompile their code in Cairo, its native language, to deploy on the network.

Still, StarkWare is now betting that its impressive throughput can lure devs to migrate over to its network, tipping that StarkNet will soon launch a validium to unlock further scalability gains of “an order of magnitude.”

Rollups, the leading scaling solution, bundle together transactions on Layer 2 before submitting them to Ethereum’s mainnet in batches to reduce the fees associated with each contained transaction. Validiums promise to deliver further scaling gains by storing most transaction data off-chain.

The Ethereum mainnet is currently processing 12 TPS daily, with the metric peaking at 22.4 in December, according to L2beat. zkSync Era is in second place with 11.33 TPS, followed by Arbitrum One with 8.6 TPS.