StarkWare LTD, the company behind the L2 privacy solutions zkSTARKS and StarkEx, has announced a Turing complete platform called Cairo.
Hello, Cairo!
1st production-grade Turing-complete STARK framework.Already on Mainnet: @reddit demo.
Powering all upcoming systems: @deversifi, @Immutable, @dydxprotocol.Need low gas for general computation at massive scale? There’s Cairo for that https://t.co/VJams09cXe
— StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) August 31, 2020
Cairo is the “first production-grade platform for generating STARK proofs for general computation”. Everything from their Reddit Bake-off submission to their upcoming deployments of DeversiFi, Immutable, and dYdX, all is written in Cairo.
The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-off was the first time when StarkWare deployed Cairo with upcoming deployments including:
- DeversiFi 2.0
- ImmutableX (Gods Unchained)
- dYdX’s Perpetual Contracts
Since each partner of StarkWare has different computation needs, Starkware created a flexible swiss army knife platform in the form of Cairo. Cairo stands for CPU Algebraic Intermediate Representation (AIR) and includes a single AIR that verifies the instruction set of this “CPU”.
Cairo comes with a single AIR that can verify any Cairo program. The Cairo AIR verifies the computational integrity and the correctness of the post-execution state of the system. With Cairo, new business logic doesn’t require a new smart contract. It only requires a different Cairo program.
Cairo programs are written in an assembly-like programming language (called, Cairo as well) with features like memory, function calls, recursion, and branching conditions. The team has created powerful development tools including a compiler from the Cairo language to Cairo byte code, a virtual machine that simulates Cairo executions, a debugger, IDE integration, and the single Verifier smart contract written in Solidity.
Cairo’s AIR is relatively simple, which leads to efficiency and low amortized costs, for both the on-chain Verifier and the off-chain proving service. It also leads to increased security, because auditing a single simple AIR is safer than auditing multiple complicated application-specific AIRs.
The team plans to release new generations of Cairo frequently. These will offer enhanced functionality, better performance, and powerful optimizations. Currently, the team is “dog-fooding” Cairo and improving it on a weekly basis with the help of their partners”.
It’s harder to implement zkrollups for defi because supporting all defi requires supporting general-purpose computation inside a SNARK, which is hard!
(Though @StarkWareLtd is trying, see their recent Cairo release https://t.co/rT2GnxWhAX)
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 1, 2020
We’ll be keeping a close eye on Cairo. You can do the same by following Starware on Twitter.
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