60 million NFTs could be minted in a single transaction: StarkWare founder

Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup tech company StarkWare founder Eli Ben-Sasson says its new Recursive validity proofs 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 Aug. 7 after announcing the start of production of StarkWare’s new Recursive validity proof technology during a presentation. 

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson said that recursive validity proofs could further scale up transaction throughput to a factor of at least ten compared to standard Validium scaling, noting that they’ve already been rolling up 600,000 mints of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the ImmutableX protocol.

“I would say the minimum I would say is 10x [...] We've been putting 600,000 mints of NFTs, which resulted in a 10 gas per mint. We can now at the very least take 10 of such proofs and generate a recursive proof of all 10 of these things,” he explained.

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

However, Ben-Sasson also added the number could “go up to 60 million with more engineering and tweaking," adding: 

“I think also reducing the latency by another factor that's 5 to 10x is also very doable.”

StarkNet is a permissionless and decentralized layer-2 ZK-rollup that uses Validium to scale transactions. Like standard ZK-Rollups, Validiums work by aggregating thousands of transactions into a single transaction. StarkNet’s new Recursive validity proof technology can batch up several 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 validity proofs can offload much of the network congestion and data availability issues that have caused trouble on the Ethereum 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 offers lower latency. 

Starknet just turned on recursion for their production SHARP systems. Recursive proving can drastically decrease the amortized cost per transaction on L1, and introduces a secure STARK-based model for layer 3. It’s exciting to witness the profound scaling solutions rolling out.

— g.mirror.xyz (@strangechances) August 7, 2022

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

Related: Blockchain’s Scaling Problem, Explained

Also speaking at ETH Seoul on Sunday, Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his enthusiasm towards ZK-rollups, further stating that the scaling solution was superior to Optimistic Rollups:

“In the longer term, ZK-Rollups are eventually going to beat Optimistic Rollups because they have these fundamental advantages, like not needing to have 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.