In 2024, Starknet, an Ethereum scaling solution, is poised to significantly enhance its Layer-2 rollup network’s efficiency and reduce costs with new parallel transaction capabilities. The recent Dencun hard fork on Ethereum has paved the way for advanced protocols, including the introduction of the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844, which has been instrumental in Starknet’s development. As a direct consequence of adopting this EIP, Starknet is now capable of dramatically lowering transaction fees.
Starknet’s Integration with Ethereum’s Ecosystem
The EIP-4844 is a landmark improvement that allows rollups to insert data into blockchain blocks more economically by employing blob space for storage rather than traditional call data. Starknet embraced this new method immediately after the Dencun upgrade, resulting in the network’s expedited processing and fee reductions. Following Starknet’s alignment with EIP-4844, the network observed transaction fees drop to approximately $0.017 each, showcasing the benefits of expanding the block size and optimizing the rollup protocol.
Upcoming Enhancements and Fee Reduction Strategies
Starknet is gearing up for its next major update in the second quarter, which will include a feature for executing transactions in parallel. This will allow the network to handle multiple transactions simultaneously, boosting throughput and speeding up operations. Furthermore, Starknet aims to further reduce network fees by the end of 2024 with the release of version 0.14.0. This update will introduce three key data availability enhancements, including Volition, which enables decentralized applications (DApps) to opt for hybrid data storage on Starknet rather than relying solely on Ethereum’s base layer. Additionally, developers will benefit from a self-iteration application that consolidates data storage proofs across multiple blocks, aiming to slash costs on the Layer-1 and pass on those savings to end-users.