LambdaClass And Starknet Foundation Going Forward

Eli Ben-Sasson, a mathematician that is changing the present and the future of computation thanks to making practical validity proofs, and Uri Kolodny, an incredible entrepreneur that had the capacity to create one of the most vibrant communities in the space, created Starkware: the biggest innovator in scientific and technological terms in the blockchain and cryptography industry.

Starkware created STARKs and FRI, the best proven solution to scale blockchains and particularly Ethereum. STARKs and FRI are being used by multiple L2s to scale Ethereum. Starkware also created Cairo, Sierra, Cairo Assembly and Cairo VM. We are completely confident Cairo will be as big or bigger than Solidity long term given that Starkware always prioritized long term over short term thinking in engineering terms.

For the past 18 months LambdaClass has been working side by side with Starkware on the development, open-sourcing and decentralization of Starknet. The amount of knowledge that we have gained on this ride is difficult to describe or even measure. We’re deeply thankful to them. Few times in our decade of existence have we met such an amazing and kind team.

We have allocated more than 35 engineers to work on critical aspects of the network going from the VM, execution engine, prover and an MLIR backend for Cairo. We teamed up very closely with Starkware to deliver 0.12 and achieve a big improvement in throughput. We also happily helped grow the community by organizing meetups and hackathons. These efforts have been supported economically by Starkware and now by the Starknet Foundation. In July 2023 LambdaClass signed a 6 year long agreement with the Starknet Foundation retroactive to January 1, 2023 in which we committed to developing core infrastructure for Starknet and helping its community grow. In exchange for a commitment from LambdaClass to prioritize its focus on Starknet. We happily accepted this since we are sure Starknet will succeed, it has an amazing community and technology.

We have a vision of how the future of the Internet should look, how it can be built collaboratively, decentralized and in the open, and we want to participate in that process. We want to build the digital avenues and the infrastructure of the new Internet. Nevertheless, this future is preceded by the present, in which the blockchain and ZK ecosystems have yet to become mainstream, and the battles to be fought and decisions to be made should reflect this. We’re all in this together. That is how this industry will maximize success.

After EthCC we decided to review some of the decisions we took these past two years. We believe that Starknet has the most vibrant community and the best technology. That’s why we plan to continue all the engineering work but we want the freedom otherwise to move quickly and make decisions independently of Starkware and the Foundation. We place high value on our freedom of thought and expression and will continue to express ourselves as we have done in the past. We believe that is what will keep us honest. It’s part of the open-source culture we believe in and it has gotten us to where we stand today.

As of today we decided to end the agreement we have with the Foundation but remain committed to our collaboration through December 31, 2023. There are technical objectives we want to complete.

We will continue to be a part of the Starknet Ecosystem and help the future of the network by building core infrastructure, products and the community. We’re motivated and want to be part of the decentralized future of Starknet by running Sequencers, Provers and Staking services.

We thank Starkware and Starknet Foundation for the open and collaborative environment they created. We hope to continue working as closely as before with Starkware, particularly with their engineering teams in such an amazing piece of infrastructure and community. We will find our ways of sustaining this effort long term.

LambdaClass Core Engineering