# Starknet Decentralization Day Summary

**URL:** <https://community.starknet.io/t/starknet-decentralization-day-summary/6913>\
**Category:** Starknet Technical Development\
**Tags:** consensus, decentralization, sequencers, provers\
**Created:** [February 17, 2023, 1:28pm UTC](https://community.starknet.io/t/starknet-decentralization-day-summary/6913 "2023-02-17T13:28:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ilia](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex005/user_avatar/community.starknet.io/ilia/32/1318_2.png) [@ilia](https://community.starknet.io/u/ilia)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2023, 1:28pm UTC](https://community.starknet.io/t/starknet-decentralization-day-summary/6913/1 "2023-02-17T13:28:47Z")

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Starknet decentralization may be roughly split in two parts: the decentralized protocol and the decentralized governance and decision-making. On February 7, 2023, StarkWare held two concurrent decentralization workshops, respectively dedicated to the above components and collectively referred to as DeGo day. This post is an account of the decentralized protocol workshop. We’ll proceed in five parts.

1. About the event
2. Background and featured design questions
3. Post-workshop reflections
4. Ideas and insights from the workshop
5. Summary

Being the first workshop on this topic, we decided to start out small. First, we contacted LambdaClass, Nethermind, Equilibrium, and Maker, both because they are deeply familiar with Starknet and because they will likely continue to develop many relevant aspects and features. Second, we reached out to strong academics who showed interest in the protocol. Lastly, we invited three builders who showed initiative and proposed concrete solutions to various decentralization problems. In total, there were 29 attendees: 15 StarkWare and 14 externals who varied from builders to academics and between. An attendance list is attached at the end of the post.

Starknet is blessed with a marvelous community and we hope for its increasing involvement in the decentralization process.

# About the event

The workshop had two goals:

1. Strengthen community involvement in the decentralization process.
2. Gain insight on designing a decentralized Starknet protocol, with a focus on [proofs in the protocol](https://community.starknet.io/t/starknet-decentralized-protocol-proofs-in-the-protocol/6030).

The workshop lasted six hours (10:00-16:00) with a simple schedule:

- 9:30-10:00 – 🥐Breakfast
- 10:00-10:45 – Introduction
- 10:45-13:00 – Division into 5 work-groups, each either focused on a particular aspect of protocol design or aiming for a complete suggestion
- 13:00-14:00 – 🍔Lunch
- 14:00-16:00 – Continuation of work-groups
- 16:00-16:30 – Brief presentation by each group
- 16:30-00:00 – Mandatory bare knuckle fight between groups until the last man standing

# Background and highlighted design questions

The background material consisted of our series of community forum posts, with emphasis on proofs. We decided to focus on proofs because we’re pleased with our understanding of questions revolving around consensus.

At a high level, we decomposed the protocol into three steps: consensus, proofs, and L1 state update. \begin{array}{ccccc} \underset{\square}{\text{consensus}} & \longrightarrow & & \overbrace{\underset{▣}{\text{proofs}}}^\text{compute} & \longrightarrow &\overbrace{\underset{\blacksquare}{\text{state update}}}^{\text{L1 interaction}}\\ \_{\text{(sequencers)}} & & & \_{\text{(provers)}} & &\_{\text{(open?)}} \end{array}

The first part of the introductory talk outlined the abstraction of consensus to a black box which outputs an L2 ledger alongside periodic L1 checkpoints. The second part outlined the proposed design questions. Specifically, we focused on proof production, proof price discovery, L1 state updates, and reward issuance. For those interested, here is the [notion link](https://www.notion.so/starkware/Decentralization-Workshop-66a9ba13f26e47738c178b66bff47dc3) used for the talk. Note the many implicit references to the post on [proofs in the protocol](https://community.starknet.io/t/starknet-decentralized-protocol-proofs-in-the-protocol/6030).

# Post-workshop reflections

With the benefit of hindsight, we use this section to refine and reflect on some of the workshop’s insights. We postpone the “raw” ideas to the next section to streamline the flow of the post.

1. For optimal performance, always have an open competition for each job with some backup mechanism. To mitigate redundancy, stop the backup as soon as someone wins the open competition.

2. Issue backup rewards according to performance, which is now measured in terms of “how much you did until you were stopped”.

3. Several approaches to backup mechanisms:

4. With the former type of backup there is a risk in case of a deterministic open race: the fastest prover will multiply identities and win all the consolation and consequently impede proof liveness if it fails. As discussed in the post on proofs, introducing nondeterminism may be interesting.

5. The latter type of PoS backup seems incentive compatible for rational stakers assuming sufficient decentralization: people will delegate their stake to large pools that compete in prover races and they will switch pools according to prover performance for profit.

6. PoS mempool protocol for proofs

7. Secrecy seems like an elegant way to incentivize provers to perform by keeping them in the dark about possible competitors.

8. To defend against underpaid transactions, use a protocol-level algorithmic base fee as an enforced lower bound for the prover resource price. Unlike 1559 it seems there’s no need to burn as provers cannot collude by bloating blocks.

9. Minting to cover underpaid jobs

# Ideas and insights from the workshop

In this section we sketch some of the key ideas that came out during the work-groups and presentations. Some are conflicting, and below they are roughly batched into groups.

1. Tortoise and hare protocols

2. Chained proof protocols

3. Random prover committees

4. Base fee for prover resource

5. Secret designation of labor

6. PoS proof dissemination protocol

7. Overpay provers by minting

# Summary

The first Starknet decentralized protocol workshop was amazing! The atmosphere was great and the problems were concrete enough to interest the participants but open enough to inspire many creative ideas and discussions. We aim to preserve the momentum generated by the workshop in two ways:

1. Continue to increase community involvement by providing more content (be it published posts, community calls, or public research sessions).
2. Start suggesting and analyzing concrete decentralized protocols for Starknet.

As always, we welcome your input, feedback, and suggestions. Until next time!

### Appendix – list of participants

1. Ittai Abraham (Hebrew University of Jerusalem; VMWare)
2. Rafael Pass (Tel Aviv University; Cornell Tech)
3. Alessandro Chiesa (Berkeley)
4. Noam Nisan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem; StarkWare)
5. Oded Naor (Technion; StarkWare)
6. Orfeas Stefanos (University of Edinburgh; Common Prefix)
7. Mikhail Komarov (Nil)
8. Iñaki Garay (LambdaClass)
9. Juan Bono (LambdaClass)
10. Mirko von Leipzig (Equilibrium)
11. Krisztian Kovacs (Equilibrium)
12. Albert Garreta (Nethermind)
13. Milan Cermak (Lindy Labs)
14. David Galindo (Valory)
15. Bartek Kiepuszewski (Maker)
16. Maciek Kaminski (Maker)
17. Ariel Elperin (StarkWare)
18. Ohad Barta (StarkWare)
19. Tom Brand (StarkWare)
20. Avihu Levy (StarkWare)
21. Oren Katz (StarkWare)
22. Gideon Kaempfer (StarkWare)
23. Anat Ganor (StarkWare)
24. Ittay Dror (StarkWare)
25. Ilya Lesokhin (StarkWare)
26. Lior Goldberg (StarkWare)
27. Alex Manuskin (StarkWare)
28. Evyatar Oster (StarkWare)
29. Ilia Volokh (StarkWare)