Starknet is gearing up to implement a range of enhancements aimed at significantly slashing transaction fees alongside Ethereum’s highly anticipated Dencun upgrade.
The announcement, made on March 12, reveals that Starknet will roll out various fee-saving measures in conjunction with Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade scheduled for March 13. Through its 0.13.1 version, Starknet aims to notably decrease transaction fees by addressing data availability costs, fixed costs, and marginal costs associated with Starknet transactions.
So Dencun drops tomorrow, and Starknet supports it from day one.
But before that happens, we want to tell you something important 📣
Dencun. Is. Only. The. Beginning.
Starknet has a barrage of plans to slash fee costs—some of which will take effect i m m e d i a t e l y.… pic.twitter.com/6ItBvBRoOY
— Starknet 🦇🔊 (@Starknet) March 12, 2024
These upgrades are anticipated to double the expected fee savings brought by Dencun. While not all fee optimizations will be immediately deployed on March 13, the Starknet Foundation plans to kick off a subsidy program to bridge the gap between current fees and anticipated costs once all upgrades are fully activated in the future.
Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO of StarkWare, highlighted the Foundation’s early fee-reduction initiative, which seeks to implement anticipated results sooner rather than later. As part of this initiative, tokens will be provided to adjust transaction fees, aligning them with conservative estimates of future network fees post-decentralization.
“To reduce user fees even earlier, the Starknet Foundation is introducing its early fee-reduction initiative. This effort aims to implement anticipated cost-cutting performance upgrades even before they take effect. As part of the program, the Foundation will allocate funds to adjust transaction fees in line with conservative estimates of future network fees once decentralization is achieved.”
These measures come on the heels of Starknet’s earlier reduction of computation costs by 50% and data availability expenses by 25% with the release of its v0.13.0 upgrade in January.
Starknet currently stands as the fifth-largest Layer 2 network with a total value locked (TVL) of $1.67 billion, as per L2Beat data.
Dencun, the eagerly awaited upgrade, promises substantial reductions in fees associated with Layer 2 transactions. Featuring EIP-4844 or proto-danksharding, Dencun will notably enhance data availability by replacing gas-intensive calldata with Binary Large Objects (blobs), eliminating competition with Ethereum transactions for gas.
Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, emphasized that Starknet users will experience greater fee reductions post-Dencun compared to other Layer 2 solutions, primarily due to the significant savings in data availability costs.
To further refine Starknet’s efficiency, the 0.13.1 version upgrade will bolster the shared prover, SHARP, by introducing a new hash system and gradually increasing the size of SHARP’s trains. Additionally, measures to reduce data availability and fixed costs are in the pipeline, with the introduction of recursive proof compression by 2025.
Further fee reductions are anticipated in late 2024 or early 2025 with the introduction of Volition, allowing developers to choose between on-chain and off-chain data storage, thereby cutting fees even further.
