Translation and proofreading: Starknet Chinese Community
Quick Facts
- Introducing STARK proof technology into the Bitcoin network, greatly expanding Bitcoin’s application scenarios
- Making Ethereum’s digital commons more inclusive
- Flexible use of the advantages of Ethereum and Bitcoin
A financial system in urgent need of reconstruction
The Starknet Foundation is committed to building a world where power is shared, creativity is paid, and opportunity is available to everyone. As Starknet L2 becomes the first protocol to support both Bitcoin and Ethereum settlement, it’s worth talking about this vision: how it has led us to where we are today, and why we think the Bitcoin network can help us achieve this vision.
The limitations of the current digital world are obvious: money, data and power are concentrated in the hands of a few people, and most people have difficulty in obtaining opportunities and participation, making the entire Internet lack diversity, creativity and innovation. This is not the original intention of the Internet. But as with the development trajectory of many things, we often choose to turn a blind eye to problems because we are accustomed to the status quo, and we will not realize the problem until cracks appear in the system.
The rise of digital gold
The financial crisis in 2008 was the moment when such a system collapsed. We have learned the limitations of the traditional financial system at a painful price: we cannot establish absolute trust in financial institutions, and we also realize that we urgently need a mechanism that allows all people to control their own assets. Thus, Bitcoin came into being.
The advent of Bitcoin in 2009 ushered in a new era of finance that had long been envisioned but never realized. For the first time, we had a truly global currency system - without intermediaries, traditional bank accounts, government intervention and policy regulation. This community-driven currency system is open to everyone, regardless of wealth, social status or nationality.
Like many emerging technologies, Bitcoin encountered technical bottlenecks and negative impacts caused by malicious actors in its early days. These two constraints have affected the popularity of Bitcoin. Slow transaction speeds, complex user experience, limited use cases for tokens, and the early labeling of "mainly used for illegal activities" have all become obstacles to the development of Bitcoin. Therefore, although Bitcoin has always been well known to the public, it has never been able to break through the mainstream market and unleash its full potential to change the world.
The birth of global public infrastructure
Six years after the advent of Bitcoin, another important player in the blockchain field came into being. Unlike Bitcoin, which focuses solely on monetary attributes, Ethereum aims to build a global public infrastructure platform where people can create decentralized applications ranging from monetary systems to identity authentication and governance mechanisms. In a sense, Ethereum is a global computer. However, like Bitcoin, Ethereum was initially limited by its own technical bottlenecks: complex user experience, new conceptual frameworks, and brand-new programming languages all limited the initial popularity of Ethereum.
Today, although many L1, L2 and L3 have emerged in the market, Bitcoin and Ethereum are still the largest and most influential projects in the Web3 field, and are the key forces that are most likely to popularize this world-changing technology to everyone. And this is exactly where Starknet comes in.
Achieving Web3 Scale
Although Starknet was initially deployed on Ethereum, it was not created just for Ethereum. Starknet aims to leverage STARK proof technology to provide a scalability solution for any blockchain, creating a secure and trusted digital world through full verifiability. From the beginning of the project, we have envisioned that this possibility also applies to the Bitcoin network. After years of research and development, we are now finally able to put this vision into practice.
Starknet is building the necessary infrastructure and establishing the necessary partnerships, which is not only a huge step forward and exciting, but perhaps even more exciting is the new possibilities this step will bring and its significance to the entire digital world.
A new cornerstone of the digital world
By enabling developers to use the same code to build applications that can settle on both Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, we will significantly expand Bitcoin's application scenarios and make Ethereum's digital commons more inclusive through faster transactions, higher scalability, and lower costs. For the first time, developers have the right to freely choose between the two major blockchains - they can flexibly call on the advantages of Ethereum and Bitcoin according to specific application scenarios.
Satoshi’s original vision of building a digital peer-to-peer payment system that can operate at scale without a centralized authority has yet to be fully realized. By bringing STARK proof technology to the Bitcoin network, we are helping to fully realize this technical blueprint. This will trigger a huge change in financial inclusion and inclusion, open up new markets, and lay a solid foundation for completely reshaping the digital world. All of this is highly consistent with Satoshi’s original vision, and it is also the ideal that the Starknet Foundation has always pursued.
Today, we are at the forefront of this exciting change, and Starknet is leading the way.
