We’re beyond excited to finally announce the launch of SN Stack—empowering everyone to build their own custom chains using the most performant, reliable, and cost-efficient zero-knowledge tech stack, powering public Starknet and many other projects.
How we got here
STARK technology has been providing massive blockchain scalability for over four years, starting with powering production-grade dApps for well-known companies, like dYdX, Immutable, and Sorare. Building on this extensive experience, the same technology has evolved to serve the most performant and cost-effective general-purpose Validity Rollup in production: Starknet.
The heavily battle-tested tech stack that powers Starknet was then adopted by Paradex, the very first ZK appchain, for building its own chain—a crypto-derivatives exchange. Paradex is leveraging Starknet infrastructure to serve 2,356 users across 75 markets, with a total value locked (TVL) of 25 million dollars since its launch in July 2023.
STARK technology has been a key driver in the success of these projects, and the Starknet tech has become so performant and battle-tested that collective efforts have been made to open up this offering to as many projects as possible. Now, any project can leverage the tech powering Starknet to create its own app-specific chain. This is the new SN Stack (Starknet Stack).
Your very own Starknet
With SN Stack, projects gain access to the advanced scalability, security, cost-efficiency, and reliability of Starknet’s heavily battle-tested technology, which they can tailor for their unique use cases. This launch represents a significant step towards making STARK technology widely accessible, enabling chains to combine high performance with the modularity and freedom to customize parameters and brand their platforms.
ZK tech—done right
Currently, there are only a few ZK tech stacks in the market that allow apps to build their own chains—none of which are as cost-effective, performant, and versatile as the SN Stack. But even more importantly, none have the experience, miles under their belts, or extensive use of the SN Stack. That’s why chains built using the SN Stack are mainnet-ready from day one.
When building a chain using the SN Stack, you get the powerful features that make public Starknet exceptional—unmatched TPS, low L1-settlement and data-availability costs, efficient state diffs, and cutting-edge proving tech—plus the ability to play around with the parameters, such as block times and block sizes. You also enjoy predictable costs and the freedom to brand your own platform. It’s your very own Starknet, with all the customizability you need.
Three flavors to best fit your needs
The SN Stack is the only tech stack in the market allowing appchain builders to choose between three different flavors of stack implementations. You can choose the battle-tested, top-performant StarkWare Sequencer flavor and get all the advantages of Starknet for your very own platform. Or you can choose the fully customizable Madara flavor, which is a community-based, open-source and appchain-centered project, built from the ground up with appchains in mind. If you are building an onchain game, you should try the Dojo flavor, which is optimized for handling the most demanding onchain games, and leverage its extensive toolchain—seamlessly out of the box—including features like Controller, native indexer, Paymaster, and VRF.
This modular structure allows us to enjoy the best of all worlds. Each flavor brings its own unique strengths, while all share the same heavily battle-tested core Starknet components—Starknet OS, CairoVM, Blockifier, provers and verifiers, L1 core contract, and more, making them all as reliable and secure as Starknet.
Why the SN Stack?
The SN Stack is superior to all other ZK tech stacks in terms of tooling, performance, and cost-effectiveness due to the contributions of several incredible teams building core components of the stack. For example, the CairoVM in Rust and Cairo Native were built and are maintained by LambdaClass; the Atlantic Prover and the Integrity Verifier are developed by the team at Herodotus; and an implementation of hints in Rust, enabling accessible execution of the Starknet OS, was done by Moonsong Labs, among additional contributions by other amazing teams.
StarkWare, which invented STARK-proving technology, is by far the most experienced team building production-grade ZK products. The Starknet tech stack has achieved incredible results—public Starknet is capable of achieving +1,000 TPS at less than $0.01 per transaction, making it the fastest cost-effective Rollup in production. Appchains built with the SN Stack can expect similar performance by leveraging the same underlying technology, which includes features like proof aggregation, parallelized execution, block packing, data availability compression, and more. Take note: Achieving industry-leading proving speed with the Stone Prover was only the beginning. You’d better hang tight for the launch of next-gen prover Stwo in 2025, taking proving speeds to the next level and unlocking client-side proving, which will add privacy features to appchains.
STARKs everywhere
This new offering is an expression of a strong belief in the power of the technology behind Starknet to benefit a wide range of purposes. Propagating Starknet tech and broader usage of STARKs, Cairo, and Stwo will empower the next generation of decentralized apps. We’re building towards the integrity web, and the SN Stack is another big step forward.
