Alchemy, which provides tools for software developers to build apps for blockchains, released a public version of its platform for StarkNet – seen as a project to watch because of the combination of two hot technologies, zero-knowledge cryptography and account abstraction.

While the new offering represents just one of the 39 blockchains that Alchemy supports, the company said that the StarkNet integration is key because of its “fast-growing developer community” and the project’s “pioneering approach to zero-knowledge rollups.”

StarkNet is a ZK rollup, which scales a main blockchain by bundling transactions and processing them for faster and cheaper on a separate one. ZK Rollups use some cryptography known as “zero-knowledge proofs,” to ensure that a transaction is valid by only showing a small amount of information about that transaction before posting it back to the main blockchain (in this case Ethereum.)

StarkNet also has native account abstraction, a concept that turns users' accounts into smart contracts, and makes the user experience of crypto wallets easier to navigate.

(By Margaux Nijkerk)