60 million NFTs can be minted in a single transaction – StarkWare founder

by · August 8, 2022

Zero-knowledge-(zk)-Rollup technology company StarkWare founder Eli Ben-Sasson says their new recursive proof of validity could theoretically roll up as many as 60 million transactions into one on the Ethereum blockchain.

The ZkSTARK co-inventor made the comments to Cointelegraph during ETH Seoul on Sunday after announcing the start of production of StarkWare’s new recursive validity technology during a presentation.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson said that recursive proofs of validity can further scale up transaction throughput by a factor of at least ten compared to standard Validium scaling, noting that they have already rolled out 600,000 mints of non-fungible tokens (NFT -er) on ImmutableX protocol.

“I would say the minimum I would say is 10x […] We have staked 600,000 mints with NFTs resulting in 10 gas per mint. We can now at least take 10 of those proofs and generate a recursive proof of all 10 of those things,” he explained:

“We could go to six million at least, and this is in the short term. It’s something that would be very easy to do.”

However, Ben-Sasson also added that the number could “go up to 60 million with more construction and customization,” adding:

“I also think reducing the wait time by another factor of 5 to 10 times is also very doable.”

StarkNet is a permissionless and decentralized layer-2 zk-Rollup that uses Validium to scale transactions. As standard zk-Rollups, Validiums work by aggregating thousands of transactions into a single transaction. StarkNet’s new recursive validity technology can aggregate multiple Validium blocks into a single proof.

This scaling solution could be a game changer for Ethereum as layer-2 scaling solutions like zk-Rollups and StarkNet’s recursive proof of validity could relieve much of the network congestion and data availability issues that have plagued Ethereum’s mainnet. Currently, Ethereum’s mainnet can process transactions at a rate of 12-15 transactions per second (TPS).

During his presentation at ETH Seoul, Ben-Sasson noted that recursion is great for scaling, as it lowers gas costs, has higher proof capacity, and provides lower latency.

StarkNet has been live on the Ethereum ainnet since June 2020. It currently operates protocols including dYdX, Immutable, DeversiFi and Celer.

Related: Blockchain’s Scaling Problem, Explained

Speaking at ETH Seoul on Sunday, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his enthusiasm for zk-Rollups, further stating that the scaling solution was superior to Optimistic Rollups:

“In the longer term, ZK-Rollups will eventually beat Optimistic Rollups because they have these fundamental advantages, like not having a seven-day withdrawal period.”

To date, the Ethereum-based scaling solutions with the most total value locked (TVL) are Arbitrum, Optimism, dYdX and Loopring.