Starknet is set to become the first network to settle and scale Bitcoin to thousands of transactions per second simultaneously on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. This will be achieved within six months after the potential upgrade of OP_CAT in Bitcoin. This is my proposal for the future of Starknet and its impact on blockchain, the global economy, and individual rights. We have taken concrete steps towards this vision and publicly support the adoption of OP_CAT.
STARKs are facing their next challenge. The timing is right, and STARKs will demonstrate their scalability on the most egalitarian currency, Bitcoin. Once Bitcoin adopts OP_CAT, the implementation of STARK verifiers in Bitcoin scripts will become a reality. This opens up channels for secure, self-custodied movement between Bitcoin and Starknet, creating a single-layer second network that scales both Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Cryptographic technology has the potential to purify the digital and financial world, providing integrity to currencies and rebalancing power in society away from big tech companies and back into the hands of sovereign individuals. It is a tool that empowers humanity and grassroots communities. In essence, it is a source of goodness. Therefore, we need a vision that showcases this and is relevant to everyone. I left my peaceful academic career to pursue this vision.
No vision can be accomplished without scaling the starting chain of this great project. By scaling Bitcoin, we will unleash the power of blockchain to change the world. StarkWare is supporting new research through practical steps and launching a $1 million fund to reveal the pros and cons of Bitcoin adopting OP_CAT in support of this plan.
Our strategic collaboration with L2 Iterative Ventures (L2 IV) and Weikeng Chen through the ZeroSync Foundation has been fruitful, culminating in the creation of the Bitcoin Wildlife Reserve. Leveraging their team’s practical engineering and research expertise, we are driving open-source work on the OP_CAT-based covenant and the implementation of STARK verifiers in Bitcoin scripts. We also extend our gratitude to BitVM and the ZeroSync Foundation for bringing awareness to the potential of Bitcoin.
Carter Feldman from QED has also been influential, showing us a new perspective and open-mindedness towards Taproot.
Following this article, StarkWare and Starknet will release several official updates. However, for now, I want to go back to the fundamental question and state why we are doing what we are doing.
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2008: The Break
It was 2008, and the global financial system had just collapsed. In response, Satoshi Nakamoto released the revolutionary Bitcoin whitepaper. In this moment of rupture, Satoshi showed us how we could do things differently. We, the public, could demand and enforce higher standards of integrity and transparency in the financial realm. Satoshi introduced an inclusive protocol that invited everyone to join, instead of relying on the fortresses and skyscrapers of traditional banks. Through Bitcoin mining and fees, this protocol fairly and transparently distributed value to its wide base of contributors. The wider the base of contributors, the better and more secure Bitcoin became.
Bitcoin gave us more than just a ledger—it gave us confidence in change. It achieved what it did precisely when the banks were failing, busy foreclosing homes, and hoping we wouldn’t notice that houses were not always “as safe as houses” even with all the “trust us” confidence in all the mortgage-backed securities.
The full potential of Bitcoin, once realized, can surpass the reality we see today. Its destiny can and should be as a widely used global reserve. It can be the foundation of a global “trust network” that supports all the social functions our free societies need: currency, property rights management, and social interactions.
The Bitcoin whitepaper envisioned a large and small network actually used for payments, operated by everyone, regardless of wealth. Today, 1.5 billion people globally don’t even have a bank account. For these people, Bitcoin payments are not just an alternative but their first exposure to financial infrastructure. The capacity provided by today’s Bitcoin is insufficient, and the existing capacity is prohibitively expensive for almost everyone among these 1.5 billion people. My motivation is to develop technology that makes Bitcoin and the free society it supports accessible to everyone.
The Elephant in the Room
Some see StarkWare as Ethereum enthusiasts. While we align with Ethereum’s values and are committed to its success, we are first and foremost STARK enthusiasts. Deploying Starknet as a Layer 2 on Ethereum and connecting Starknet to Bitcoin is a natural extension of its capabilities. This aligns with our steadfast vision since the founding of StarkWare: that STARKs are a public good required to scale any truly decentralized blockchain project. Ethereum, too, embodies the same ambitious mission outlined earlier, albeit taking a different path with different trade-offs. This is good because, overall, it increases our chances of building a protocol that can withstand nation-state actors. The core values of Ethereum are why we chose it as the settlement layer for Starknet, and those values still hold true. We firmly believe in Ethereum and are committed to its long-term success. Introducing ZK-STARKs to Bitcoin is not a deviation from our path but a return to the starting point. So far, StarkWare has deployed all its systems on Ethereum. But the idea of scaling blockchains using STARKs originated at a Bitcoin conference in the spring of 2013.
I took the stage at the conference, discussing my early and somewhat quirky research on what would later be called STARKs, and many in the audience responded that this cryptographic research was exactly what blockchain needed. In other words, I was “red-pilled” on Bitcoin before Ethereum launched two years earlier.
So, StarkWare has been deeply involved with Bitcoin from the start and has been observing the network with admiration. Now, as Taproot and the potential of OP_CAT shape the possibilities for Bitcoin, it is time to have this conversation openly.
We have also supported groundbreaking Bitcoin projects like ZeroSync, which integrates ZK proofs with Bitcoin to enhance privacy and scalability. StarkWare also commissioned researcher John Light to write the “Effective Rollups on Bitcoin” report, reevaluating the potential of integrating existing rollup solutions with Bitcoin and coming to the conclusion that there may be an ideal match. Our next-generation circular STARK prover-verifier, Stwo, operates on the finite field M31. This field aligns well with Bitcoin scripts, making us well-suited to provide the next generation of Bitcoin scalability.
What I Hope to See
My dream is to see Bitcoin achieve the scale it needs to serve everyone, open to all without economic barriers. I believe this must be done in line with Satoshi’s commitment to decentralization and security.
The internet started as a playground for a niche group of engineers and scholars. It took years to scale it into the infrastructure that supports our lives. Blockchain is a tool that runs on top of the internet, democratizing and rebalancing power by distributing trust and integrity to sovereign individuals in large communities, rather than entrusting it to a few big companies. But to truly seize power and bring it back to the masses, it needs to scale.
I also believe that the opportunity to scale Bitcoin should be leveraged to advance a value that many in the Bitcoin community consider important: privacy. The same cryptography that enables Bitcoin scalability also provides the raw materials for enhanced privacy capabilities. Over time, we will see that you can have it all: your keys, your coins, your privacy.
How Do We Expect to Achieve This Goal?
We, StarkWare, are taking three concrete actions today to scale Bitcoin:
1. We will propose a new design for Starknet that unifies space by making Starknet a self-custodied decentralized Layer 2 while settling simultaneously on Ethereum and Bitcoin. A single layer that settles on both chains. Our team will undertake or sponsor all the work necessary to achieve this goal. The architectural details we are researching will be announced in the coming weeks.
2. StarkWare has launched a $1 million fund to grant Bitcoin researchers and developers to research OP_CAT and its implications. These grants will be awarded to individuals and projects that approach research with a good faith attitude, whether supporting or opposing the upgrade, as well as contributors who provide conceptual validation for OP_CAT use cases. Details of this fund will be announced next week.
3. Finally, we believe that OP_CAT Bitcoin soft fork is the safest path to Bitcoin scalability, particularly enabling STARK verification and rollups. Therefore, we announce our public support for OP_CAT. OP_CAT makes it possible to perform trustless rollups on Bitcoin by enabling recursive covenants capable of autonomously managing and updating their state, significantly increasing transaction throughput without overwhelming Bitcoin.
What Can Scaling Bitcoin Unlock?
By scaling Bitcoin, we will be able to process millions of transactions per second, serving hundreds of millions of users in a single second, compared to the current limit of around 13 transactions per second. Some use cases we envision for scaling Bitcoin include:
1. Simultaneously scaling Bitcoin and Ethereum: Blockchain today is fragmented. You can choose Bitcoin as “digital gold” for store of value but not much else, or you can choose Ethereum, which aims to be the “world computer,” or other smaller chains. By bridging and offering a choice of both the largest chains (dApps can choose one or both), Starknet will eliminate their fragmentation. It will scale both without interfering with the independent governance of either chain.
2. Privacy: STARKs, the cryptographic proofs used for scaling, have inherent, yet unrealized, privacy potential. This potential aligns well with the Bitcoin community. The “zero-knowledge” aspect of the technology is well understood but still needs to be untangled and translated into practical solutions. Integrating private layers into the Bitcoin ecosystem, leveraging technologies like Zcash, MimbleWimble, or Noir, can significantly enhance transaction privacy.
3. Providing financial services to the excluded: For us, part of Bitcoin’s mission has always been about empowering marginalized groups. Approximately 1.5 billion people globally lack access to traditional banking services, becoming barriers to financial upward mobility. Previous attempts to scale Bitcoin have not provided solutions for widespread use. Through new scaling approaches and additional tools, Bitcoin has the potential to provide inclusive and global financial systems for the unbanked.
4. Financial innovation on Bitcoin: Today, Bitcoin supports digital cash payments, but modern markets require more: better self-custody options with programmable vaults, risk management and hedging tools, credit, lending, derivatives, futures contracts, and more. All of this requires more functionality that cannot and should not be built directly on Bitcoin. Making Starknet a layer on Bitcoin offers a win-win solution: the vast financial innovation secured by Bitcoin as digital gold.
5. Improved user experience: The original self-custody security of Bitcoin also makes it challenging to handle securely from the perspective of an ordinary user. Modern Layer 2s will provide users with secure and simple self-custody interactions that meet most of their daily needs while relying on Bitcoin’s robust but heavyweight layer one security as long-term storage.
Why Choose OP_CAT, STARKs, and Starknet?
Why choose OP_CAT? STARKs only require verification of hash chains, nothing more. Their primary verification loop consists of simple algebraic operations (addition and multiplication modulo small primes) and verifying that entries pre-committed through Merkle trees are correctly opened. OP_CAT uniquely enables the creation and opening of Merkle tree entries in Bitcoin scripts because the core operations that enable Merkle tree creation and verification involve concatenating two values and then hashing them (OP_CAT enables concatenation). While other opcodes enabled by covenants may be more powerful, OP_CAT is the only opcode currently under discussion that allows Merkle tree verification.
Why choose STARKs? In short, they offer the largest scale, are battle-tested, the most secure, require no trusted setup “toxic waste,” have no exotic cryptographic primitives, and are even post-quantum secure. The numbers used by the new STARK prover-verifier, Stwo, are small and suitable for the Bitcoin stack, resulting in greater efficiency.
Why choose Starknet? Starknet already has a vibrant developer community on Ethereum, along with a programming language that puts the full power of scaling in their hands. For any developer familiar with Rust, Starknet’s native and open-source Cairo language will feel familiar. The Bitcoin community today does not have an obvious high-level language to build on-chain activities. I hope Cairo can fill this gap and become one of the native languages of Bitcoin.
