Starknet v0.13.0 is live on mainnet.
Starknet v0.13.0 focuses on 2 aspects: It lays the groundwork for a new transaction version, v3, and it will facilitate a significant reduction to transaction fees.
Added on January 11th, 2024: v0.13.0 will come with another mainnet upgrade on January 15th that will include various performance improvements. See this post for details.
V3 Transactions
V3 transactions will facilitate transaction fee payments in Starknetās native token, STRK, once it becomes transferable. Fee payment in STRK will come in addition to Ether (ETH), the token with which users have paid fees until now.
As a Validity Rollup, Starknet has operational costs in L1 gas and, consequently, in ETH. V3 transactions will allow users to pay in STRK for their L1 gas consumption. To charge maximally accurate fees, the sequencer will use oracles to quote the rate of STRK/gas.
The oracle services will be provided by Pragma and Switchboard, with a further fallback to manual price-setting. For a more detailed discussion, see this community forum thread.
By enabling fee payment in STRK, Starknet v0.13.0 opens the doors to upcoming features in the roadmap that will be developed specifically for STRK fee payments.
These features will be released in future versions and include:
- Fee Market: Will allow users to compete for blockspace during congestion, enabling those willing to pay for priority. There is already a design for this feature based on Ethereumās EIP-1559.
- Paymaster: Modeled after Ethereumās EIP-4437, Starknetās Paymasters will enable entities other than the transaction sender to pay transaction fees on the senderās behalf. Native account abstraction on Starknet will make the process of using the paymaster much easier.
- Volition Mode: Permitting users and developers to opt out of expensive L1 data availability in favor of much cheaper alternatives, e.g. L2 data availability.
Transaction Fee Reduction
Starknet v0.13.0 will also include some transaction fee reductions:
-
Cairo step/builtin costs: 50% reduction
-
L1 data availability:
- 10% across the board for DA
- constant 240 gas discount per tx + 312 gas discount per every contract changed
For erc-20 transfers, the DA fee reductions add up to 25%!
Items (1) and (2.1) above are possible due increasing block size in the near future (this is already being priced in). For the first item, larger blocks mean more steps per proof submitted to L1 (for more details, see the documentation on the transaction fee mechanism). For the second, according to our estimates, a 2x increase from the current blocksize will cause more ābatchingā of storage updates, justifying a reduced cost from users. Item (2.2) is due to a more accurate pricing of transactions.
Voting on Version upgrade
Starknet v0.13.0 is live on Goerli testnet, and on Sepolia integration and testnet.
You can read more about this new transaction type here and here.