StarkWare has it’s own programing language - Cairo is a language for creating STARK-provable programs for general computation. Cairo powers StarkEx, which scales applications on Mainnet (including dYdX, Sorare, Immutable X, and DeversiFi).
Cairo is the native smart contract language for StarkNet, a permissionless decentralized Validity-Rollup. StarkNet uses the Cairo programming language both for its infrastructure and for writing StarkNet contracts.
Cairo has all of those solutions:
An underlying field integer data type called felt is available (along with the uint256 type)
Cairo language is traditionally written once (similar to functional programming languages)
More and more built-in non-deterministic hints are being developed for common computations
Cairo provides full low-level access to low-level primitives
Cairo programming is more challenging and the ecosystem tools are still maturing. But the whole point of scaling Ethereum is to go beyond existing limitations and build better composable applications.
The company is on a long path from Centralization towards Decentralization. As a business model StarkEx is capturing value (revenue) with partial agreement between StarkEx and particular project (dYdX, DeversiFi, etc). With StarkNet the idea is to be participant on the Network and provide services to the network, generating revenue by doing so. Building application, hardware is the other focus of the StarkNet.
The decentralization of the network has two aspects:
The permissionless layer of Sequencers and Provers ensures that the network will be censorship-resistant.
The usage of STARK-proofs ensures that everyone will be able to verify the full StarkNet chain with low hardware requirements, regardless of the network’s throughput, and without trusting any external entity.
The general idea of decentralization is :
Better ability to expand company—it is important for organizations to constantly explore new opportunities to provide goods and services to its customers.
Increased morale of employees—the success of an organization depends on its ability to obtain, develop, and retain highly motivated employees. Empowering employees to make decisions is one way to help increase employee morale.
Many other benefits provided by the blockchain and personalization of our data.
In other words:
Centralized structure has very small amount of intellectual capacity, concentrated in the high end of the pyramid (upper management), compared to the Decentralized structures which are not restricted by location, time and many other factors. Instead thinking with 100 brains power and many executors, decentralized structures count on 10 000 (figuratively speaking) brains with less executive power needed because the methods are more efficient and well think of. The focus will be improved collective vision for the project as a whole.
In all of the decentralized structures the main “glue” is the VALUE that people of the community are creating, believing and rely upon. Mutual trust, mission, vision of the better product/project.
StarWare is on the path of Decentralization and their getting there fast!
The Cairo VM is a STARK-friendly, Turing-complete von-Neumann CPU architecture. It includes a programming language called Cairo, which is based on Cairo assembly and AIR (Algebraic Intermediate Representations), making it highly efficient to compile.
Let's first take a look at Cairo VM. Cairo VM is a parallel state machine that allows transactions to be executed concurrently, significantly increasing TPS. In contrast, EVM is a serial state machine.
Cairo is a smart contract language that can be deployed on or off Starknet. Any Cairo program can generate STARK proofs. Its syntax is similar to Rust.
Cairo programs are collections of assembly code, and Cairo developers will write smart contracts in the high-level language Cairo rather than Cairo assembly. When we write a Cairo program, the Cairo compiler will compile the Cairo code into Cairo assembly, and the Cairo assembler will take the assembly code and generate Cairo bytecode (which runs on the Cairo CPU) to be executed in the Cairo VM.
Here are some Cairo's features.
From the bold decision of the StarkWare team to develop the project from the ground with a new programing language and many infrastructural difficulties on the way, they managed to get traction and currently it’s one of the most interesting and innovative ecosystems in the whole space.
Many project in the StarkNet ecosystems will be plain and simple copies of already existing ones in other networks but still there is plenty of room for innovation and I’m sure that they will manage to deliver in a creative way!