In August 2023, Starknet took a big leap forward in decentralizing its technology and empowering the developer community to build upon it independently by open-sourcing its battle-tested Stone prover. And indeed, the community (you!) stepped to the challenge and has since done truly astounding work to extend Stone’s capabilities, including two that are already available today:
- Using Stone to Prove Cairo Programs: Stone has been in production since June 2020, playing a critical role in proving transactions from decentralized applications powered by StarkWare such as StarkEx and Starknet. Back in 2020, however, Cairo was a very different language, and as such Stone was built to prove an older version of it (now known as Cairo Zero) – but no more! Thanks to the mighty LambdaClass team, Stone is now capable of proving both Cairo and Cairo Zero programs
- Verifying Stone Proofs on Starknet: Obviously, generating proofs (either of Cairo or Cairo Zero programs) won’t get you far without verifying them. Moreover, the generated proofs are only as secure as the entity that verifies them – which is precisely why this verification needs to be onchain. So far, however, Stone proofs could only be verified offchain using the C++ verifier available in the Stone codebase – but no more! Thanks to the incredible Herodotus team, you can now use the Integrity verifier to verify Stone proofs on Starknet.
“What about using Stone to power Starknet Appchains”, you say? The missing piece of this puzzle is the Starknet OS program, whose job is to verify the validity of Starknet blocks. So far, however, the execution of the Starknet OS was solely supported via the old and only partially open-sourced Pythonic infrastructure – but no more! The amazing Moongsong Labs team is hard at work on enabling the Starknet OS to be executed using the new and fully open-source Rusty infrastructure.
More will follow and be described later, but for now, you’re more than welcome to join the Stonehenge TG group and start building 