- Vitalik Buterin and StarkWare are investors in Kakarot Labs.
Soon, EVM compatibility will be available for Starknet, which TVL ranks as the seventh-largest Layer 2 network. This will allow established DeFi protocols to flourish within the Ethereum ecosystem.
The public mainnet phase of Kakarot Labs’ modular, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) located in Cairo was launched on May 22.
This action prepares Starknet’s ecosystem to be EVM-compatible, as the widely used Layer 2 will use the Cairo programming language to enable smart contract execution using its custom CairoVM.
According to Elias Tazartes, the CEO and co-founder of Kakarot Labs, Kakarot is essentially an Ethereum execution engine built with Cairo. This engine will eventually be incorporated into Starknet appchains, making ZK-rollups that utilize the Cairo stack EVM compatible.
The StarkWare Exploration Team and the open-source Starknet developer community collaborated to construct the Kakarot ZK-EVM for the first time in October 2022.
The group behind Starknet, StarkWare, and Ethereum’s principal scientist, Vitalik Buterin, participated in a pre-seed financing round that Kakarot Labs announced in June 2023.
Compatibility with EVM
According to L2beat, Starknet is currently the seventh-largest Layer 2 with more than $1 billion in total value locked (TVL). However, the majority of its TVL was obtained through the much-awaited STARK airdrop that took place on February 20.
With the project distributing $2.1 billion worth of tokens at a $30 billion fully diluted valuation per STARK’s initial trading price, the decline was the biggest in web3 history. Starknet’s TVL surged by almost 550% to $1.22 billion from $187 million in just one night as a result of the decline.
Starknet’s pre-airdrop TVL, which has slowly increased from $56 million in May 2023 to $187 million in February, highlights the obstacles to the network’s expansion caused by its incompatibility with EVMs.
On the other hand, a lot of EVM-compatible L2s have gained traction fast because they make it simple for existing protocols that use Solidity, Ethereum’s main coding language, to expand onto other networks.
Developers who wanted to expand on the Starknet Stack now had to learn Cairo, a programming language designed specifically for STARK cryptography, as opposed to Solidity, which is Ethereum’s primary language, according to Kakarot Labs.
This obstacle will be removed with the release of Kakarot zkEVM, which will allow developers to use Solidity and create an ecosystem that is more welcoming to all.
The project plans to create a public whitelist and a permissionless public testnet after the first of three test network deployments, which is Kakarot’s public whitelist phase.
According to the project, its testnet deployments will give developers the opportunity to experiment with well-known tools like MetaMask and Foundry in a Cairo-based environment.
Developers can test and improve new protocol modifications and the most recent developments in cryptocurrency user experiences by taking part in this phase, according to Kakarot.
Disclaimer : This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
