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ZK Developments: A Short Primer into Starkware, Succinct, and Union
Jake Kennis
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Key Takeaways
7 min read
  • Starkware is introducing EVM support and is expanding to Bitcoin, tapping into a $1.1T market in the next few months. Additionally, Starkware has made strides in adding parallel execution and block packing to further scale the network, boasting over 500 TPS, 2-second block times, and sub $0.01 fees. However, their token still faces an uphill battle with unlocks and a very high FDV/MC. Users can farm incentives on Starkware to potentially build a STRK position for the imminent staking functionality to go live.
  • Succinct is bringing ZKPs mainstream via SP1, a generalized zkVM that went live a few months ago and is already supporting over $1b in TVL through protocols such as AggLayer and Celestia. More recently, they collaborated with the OP Stack to allow any chain to use SP1, unlocking many benefits, including the ability to launch a zkEVM, achieve faster finality (down to just 1hr from 7 days), and much more.
  • Union is building a trustless interoperability protocol powered by ZK under the hood. This is tapping into the nearly $7.9b of value locked in bridges today, in a world of hundreds of chains. Their trusted setup for their proving system went live last week and they are inching closer to mainnet.
  • STRK's tokenomics are not favorable, the supply unlocks are not something attractive to take a positon in despite the team shipping and the general improvements to the network. Alternatively, we actually think OP has the most to gain from these recent developments due to the increasing network effects and velocity of new OP Stack chains and ZK integrations alike.

What are Some of the top ZK Developments Recently?

ZK continues to accelerate, only gaining more adoption and providing its benefits across all parts of the crypto stack. In this note, we will cover Starkware, Succinct, and Union Build. These three projects cover the current scalability of validity rollups, trustless bridging technology, and embedding ZKPs across all ecosystems such as the OP stack and Tendermint chains.

Starkware

Anecdotally, if you used Starkware in the past, it was not always the smoothest experience - transactions took a while to settle, there wasn't that much to do, it was expensive to use and overall, it was not production-ready compared to its EVM-compatible L2 counterparts such as Arbitrum or Base....