Consensys and StarkWare announced their partnership in late June of this year with the goal of bringing ZK-rollups to MetaMask and Infura developers. MetaMask created a StarkNet Snap (only available in MetaMask Flask), while Infura launched a private beta for developers to experience the power of the Infura network on StarkNet. 

Both initiatives have been extremely successful, improving the developer experience and driving adoption of ZK-rollups. Over 13,000 users have installed and tried the StarkNet snap to date, and after a successful private beta with over 1700 registrants, StarkNet on Infura is ready for wide release. The partnership has now expanded to include Consensys Diligence, a smart contract security auditing service.  

Through the combination of these services, from development with Snaps, auditing with Diligence, and deployment with Infura, the Consensys product portfolio is completing the Web3 tech stack and providing a one-stop-shop for developers using StarkNet. Developers can easily access the best tools in the Web3 tech stack through Consensys: 

  • Infura provides reliable node support and high-availability APIs for developers to connect and deploy to StarkNet. 

  • Diligence offers best-in-class security audit services for Cairo smart contracts. 

  • Developers can build intuitive user experiences through the joint use of the Infura API along with MetaMask’s StarkNet Snap.

And coming soon, the Truffle Box for StarkNet will provide code templates and instructions to accelerate dapp creation.  

More about StarkWare and ZK-Rollups 

StarkNet is the first permissionless decentralized ZK-rollup. The network operates as an L2 network on top of Ethereum that enables dapps to achieve scalability for their computational needs without compromising Ethereum’s composability and security.

StarkNet is launched by StarkWare, whose co-founder also co-created the pioneering technologies for all ZK-rollups. Besides improved scaling, StarkNet facilitates quick withdrawals and cross-chain app transfers. It also lowers transaction costs by aggregating transactions efficiently.  

Solving the L2 UI puzzle with MetaMask Snaps

The incredible features that StarkNet offers are tantalizing, from the scalability that’s so appealing to developers, to the speed and affordability that users want, to the security of rolling up to Ethereum, which appeals to everyone.

Those features come at a price, though, which is that this technology is not out-of-the-box EVM-compatible; it uses a different address and account format. What that means for the user is that the most popular crypto wallet, MetaMask, won’t work with StarkNet. There are current user flows for interacting with StarkNet that involve MetaMask; the user bridges tokens from Ethereum or any other EVM-compatible network into StarkNet–at which point they have to use a different, specially-built wallet to access and use them on StarkNet.

Bridging tokens from one wallet to another blockchain and wallet just so that you can use a single dapp is obviously a sub-optimal user experience. Moreover, in a world where more networks are springing up with interesting use cases and novel designs, a fractured, multi-wallet reality threatens to become the default.

From a wallet design and engineering perspective, this is even more of a nightmare: what is MetaMask to do, choose which networks to create wallets for? Build new cryptography standards into the wallet every time someone creates a new network? Beyond obvious questions of favoritism, there are very real practical limits to how many networks they could support. 

Enter MetaMask Snaps: a system which allows anyone to modify the functionality of MetaMask, and implement their own API within the wallet. This allows the creators of new networks to add support for their network directly to MetaMask, permissionlessly. 

And we’ve done just that: created an integration for users to access StarkNet from within MetaMask, available to test out here. This functionality is still in the wallet’s test distribution, MetaMask Flask, but will be available in production soon. 

StarkNet on Infura is now available to all developers 

After a successful private beta, Infura announced today that StarkNet is now available to all developers and is inviting builders to experience the ease of fast transactions, low gas fees, and Ethereum-level security of StarkNet on Infura. 

According to Ignatius Widjaja, Principal Engineer at Immutable, "Immutable X has been an Infura customer for a year. As we're building a cross-rollup NFT liquidity layer on StarkNet, we continue to leverage Infura's infrastructure to provide us with a stable platform for Web3 games and GameFi use cases." 

Benefits of building with StarkNet and Infura include: 

  • Scalability: Increased scalability with high throughput, as the result of the efficiency of STARK technology. The innovative zero-knowledge proof system uses cryptography to efficiently and transparently verify and prove transaction integrity. Because StarkNet bundles data and processes transactions off-chain with STARK proofs that require very little computational power to verify, it enables scaling by orders of magnitude greater than other scaling solutions.

  • Security: Verification of dapp transactions take place on the Ethereum mainnet.

  • Speed: StarkNet provides fast finality, potentially exceeding existing throughput levels by 2-3 times transactions per second and withdrawals that take minutes, not days.

To learn more about how to use StarkNet on Infura and the benefits for building, check out the full announcement on the Infura blog. 

Consensys Diligence to offer audits for Cairo on StarkWare 

Consensys Diligence and StarkWare teamed up earlier this year with the goal of expanding security audit capabilities for smart contracts written in Cairo and deployed on StarkWare. 

In order to achieve this, Consensys Diligence formed an internal research team of auditors with support and resources from StarkWare. Once the team learned the language, they moved on to practice demo audits that were monitored and completed in close collaboration with the StarkWare team. 

Consensys Diligence will begin offering Cairo audits in November 2022. To learn more about the partnership, check out this Diligence blog.

And if you’re interested in auditing your Cairo smart contracts, please contact the Diligence team here and specify that you are working on StarkNet in the inquiry box.

Offering the Web3 development stack 

The Consensys product portfolio offers the full Web3 development stack, providing a one-stop-shop for developers using StarkNet and beyond. 

From dapp development using MetaMask Snaps, to auditing smart contracts with Diligence, and mainnet deployment and infrastructure services using Infura, Web3 developers have all the tools they need to build their innovations with ease. And with Truffle Box for StarkNet coming soon, this tech stack will only grow more powerful and complete.

Interested in working with Consensys to provide your developer community with the Web3 dev stack? Please contact us here.