We’ve been seeing a lot of projects migrating to or building on Starknet. The growth of Starknet’s ecosystem is actually notable in this bear market. And that’s because Starknet ecosystem attracts a lot of developers. So what is Starknet and how is it different from other chains?
Starknet is a relatively new Ethereum L2 that is a permissionless decentralized Validity Rollup (commonly known as a ZK-Rollup). It provides opportunities for scaling, with cheaper and faster transactions.
Starknet achieves that by using the STARK cryptographic proof system. STARK (Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge) uses publicly verifiable randomness to create trustless verifiable systems and is also resistant against quantum computing attacks.
Cairo
One of the main differences from other Ethereum L2s is that Starknet is not EVM compatible and is instead powered by its own custom-built and specialized programming language, Cairo. Starknet runs on Cairo VM (CVM), built to escape limitations of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
“Cairo is the first Turing-complete language for creating provable programs for general computation.” according to Starknet’s documentation.
It is a high-level language that was inspired by Rust. Cairo is made to be developer-friendly: easier to read and write in. Despite being relatively new, it’s the 4th most popular smart contract language by TVL.
To get familiar with it, you can read the Cairo Book. Here’s also an interactive tutorial for beginners to get you started: Starklings.
Starknet offers an essential toolset to build dApps that is compatible with multiple languages like JavaScript, Rust, and Python. You can use the Starknet SDK for development. Front-end developers can use Starknet.js with React, while Rust and Python work well for back-end tasks.
Layer 3
Starkent also has a Layer 3 solution for developers who want to run their own chains for their dApps. Those are called appchains. Developers can create appchains using Starknet Stack, the ecosystem’s native developer tooling.
Appchains allow customization like hash functions, custom fee market logic, consensus algorithms, etc. They have separate governance and are shielded from network congestion while also inheriting the security features of the Layer 1 or Layer 2 blockchains they are built upon.
Game development on Starknet
Dojo is an open source provable game engine and toolchain that operates on Starknet. It lets developers build on-chain games and autonomous worlds with cheaper and faster transactions.
Dojo includes tools like:
- ECS (Entity Component System) – a design pattern used in game development for attaching unique features (components) to game objects (entities).
- Sozo – a toolchain for deploying games on Starknet.
- Torii – an automatic indexer for easier data queries of game state changes. Queries on Torii are made in GraphQL.
- Katana – a testnet, a.k.a. a local Starknet node for testing applications.
To learn more about Dojo you can access its documentation here.
Games on Starknet
Three notable gaming projects on Starknet that you can already play are:
- Influence
- Loot Survivor
- Shoshin
Loot Survivor is a Play2Die game, where you create a character to explore game levels that get progressively harder. It’s developed by Realms and is soon going live on Starknet mainnet.
Influence is a space-strategy MMO where you colonize asteroids, harness resources, and forge a new civilization amidst the vast unknown.
Shoshin is a TPS-agnostic asynchronous strategy game – a 2D fighting game where you play by designing strategy for asynchronous fights.
You can find these and other cool web3 games on our awesome list on GitHub. Give it a star if you like it! You can also suggest other games to the list.
Thank you for reading! Would you choose Starknet for building a dApp?