StarkNet makes Cairo 1.0 open source in step toward greater community control

Zero-knowledge (ZK)-Rollup tech company StarkWare has officially open sourced its new programming language compiler, Cairo 1.0, which will soon be supported on Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution StarkNet in Q1 2023. 

The news was announced by StarkWare — the company behind StarkNet — in a Nov. 25 Twitter post. StarkWare’s rollup technology and recursive proofs offer the potential to compress millions of transactions on L2 into a single transaction on Ethereum, however the project has been criticized for maintaining control over its IP, not least of all by its more open source focused competitor zkSync.

StarkWare described open sourcing Cairo as a “milestone move” in its quest to hand over more control and intellectual property rights to its community and developers. Cairo is a programming language written specifically to harness the power of zk rollups and validity proofs.

The day has come: a first look into Cairo 1.0, fully open-source

This is a big step towards open-sourcing the StarkNet stack

You can now get familiar with the new syntax, compile and run simple programs locally. #StarkNet support is coming soonhttps://t.co/0tdZDhopEP

— StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) November 24, 2022

StarkWare stated that developers can now experiment with Cairo 1.0 by compiling and executing simple applications until it is fully supported on StarkNet in Q1 2023.

At that point Cairo 1.0 will enable faster feature development and allow for more community involvement, according to Starkware Exploration Lead and former Ethereum core developer Abdelhamid Bakhta.

“We’re continuing to open source the StarkNet tech stack, beginning with Cairo 1.0. We’re doing this in order to fulfill StarkNet’s vision as a public good that anyone can use, and that the community can constantly improve,” he said.

“On a practical level this maximizes transparency about our code, and our coding process. And it strengthens the community’s ability to find bugs and improve the compiler. With each aspect of the tech stack that is open sourced, this sense of community involvement will grow and grow.”

Once in production, Cairo 1.0 will also enable blockchain developers to write and deploy smart contracts to StarkNet, according to StarkWare’s Medium post.

StarkWare added that because Cairo 1.0 makes every computation “provable,” StarkNet’s censorship resistance properties will be strengthened and it’ll also be better positioned to respond to Denial-of-Service…