StarkWare Announces Stwo, an Open-Source Zero-Knowledge Prover

According to Blockworks, StarkWare, the company behind the scaling solution Starknet, has announced the development of Stwo, a zero-knowledge prover designed to reduce latency and transaction costs. The new prover will be open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing anyone to fork the code, modify, and distribute modified versions of the software, according to Oren Katz, the chief operating officer at StarkWare. Katz stated that Stwo will bring new possibilities for scaling and will be available for everyone since it will be open-source from day one. In the context of blockchain technology, zero-knowledge provers are computation entities responsible for determining the accuracy of given information without revealing its underlying data. These provers must create 'proofs' that can then be verified by verifiers. Stwo will not be the first open-sourced prover developed by StarkWare. The public Starknet blockchain and Starknet app chains currently use its first-generation prover called Stone. Katz notes that Stwo will be an evolution of the Stone prover, thanks to the Circle Stark protocol developed in partnership with Polygon. The Circle Stark protocol's Circle STARK proofs increase the efficiency of existing STARKs, which are used to attest to the validity of a specific state on zero-knowledge blockchains. Stwo is an evolution of the Stone prover because the Circle Stark protocol circumvents the constraints imposed by the classic STARK protocol, which previously prevented STARK from being used efficiently for smaller fields, according to Katz.