Kakarot Labs is backed by StarkWare and Vitalik Buterin.
Starknet, the seventh-largest Layer 2 community by TVL, will quickly take pleasure in EVM-compatibility, opening the floodgates to established DeFi protocols inside the Ethereum ecosystem.
On Might 22, Kakarot Labs launched the general public mainnet section for its modular Cairo-based zero-knowledge Ethereum Digital Machine (EVM). The transfer units the stage for Starknet’s ecosystem to turn into EVM-compatible, with the favored Layer 2 leveraging the Cairo programming language and facilitating sensible contract execution by way of its bespoke CairoVM.
“Kakarot is basically an Ethereum execution engine constructed with Cairo,” mentioned Elias Tazartes, CEO and co-founder of Kakarot Labs. “In time, this engine will likely be built-in into Starknet appchains, thus permitting any ZK-rollup that makes use of the Cairo stack to be EVM suitable.”
The Kakarot ZK-EVM was first created in October 2022 via a joint improvement effort from the StarkWare Exploration Staff and the open-source Starknet developer neighborhood.
In June 2023, Kakarot Labs introduced a pre-seed funding spherical that includes participation from StarkWare, the workforce behind Starknet, and Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s chief scientist.
EVM-compatibility
Whereas Starknet at present ranks because the seventh-largest Layer 2 with greater than $1 billion in whole worth locked (TVL), based on L2beat, the lion’s share of its TVL was achieved via its long-anticipated STARK airdrop on Feb. 20.
The drop was the biggest within the historical past of web3, with the undertaking distributing $2.1 billion price of tokens at a $30 billion absolutely diluted valuation per STARK’s preliminary buying and selling worth. The drop additionally catapulted Starknet’s TVL greater than 550% to $1.22 billion from $187 million in a single day.
Nevertheless, Starknet’s modest pre-airdrop TVL illustrates the obstacles posed to the community’s development by its lack of EVM-compatibility, with its TVL having sluggishly risen from $56 million in Might 2023 to $187 million in February.
In contrast, many EVM-compatible L2s have rapidly garnered momentum by enabling established protocols leveraging Solidity — Ethereum’s major coding language — to simply migrate onto new networks.
“As we speak, builders trying to construct on the Starknet Stack confronted the problem of studying Cairo, the programming language developed particularly for STARK cryptography, distinct from Solidity, the mainstay language of Ethereum,” Kakarot Labs mentioned. “The introduction of Kakarot zkEVM will remove this barrier by enabling builders to make use of Solidity, thereby fostering a extra inclusive surroundings inside the ecosystem.”
Kakarot’s public whitelist section is the primary of three take a look at community deployments, with the undertaking set to comply with up with a public whitelist and permissionless public testnet launches.
The undertaking mentioned its testnet deployments will permit builders to experiment. acquainted tooling comparable to MetaMask and Foundry inside a Cairo-based setting. “By collaborating on this section, builders can take a look at and optimize new protocol modifications and the most recent developments in crypto person experiences,” Kakarot mentioned.
