The Starknet Culture with Abdel Bakhta

welcome to bankless where we explored the frontier of Stark net today on the show if you ever remember listening to my older episodes which I called layer zero episodes no not layer zero the bridge layer zero the fact that all of these layer ones are supported by humans supported by people supported by tribes and cultures that's what we call the layer zero here on bankless and today we are exploring the layer zero of Stark net I had on abdell abel. Stark a screen name uh from the Stark net starkware Community uh and we talked just talked a

little bit about what it means to be inside of the Stark net Community who are these people what is the vibe of the tribe why did people come to plant their plant their settlement settle into the world of Stark net and then also what is exciting in the world of Stark net this is this spawn out of a conversation that I had with uh abdell on Twitter after I made a tweet that I shot from the hip uh calling Stark net the least aligned eum layer 2 uh I explain what I mean by that here in this episode but it it's not as

it seems it was an errant tweet I'll call it uh and we unpacked that a little bit here on the show today so I hope you enjoy this conversation with abdell from Stark net but first before we get into that conversation a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible Kraken knows crypto kraken's been in the crypto game for over a decade and as one of the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry Kraken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be human history is a story of progress it's part of us hardwired we're designed

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tax withholdings through their real-time tax calculations that can be done by toku or integrated into any payroll e providers in any jurisdiction toku is a trusted provider of protocol Labs dydx Foundation Mina protocol and many more get started for free and make token compensation simple at tok.com bankless hey abdell how's it going hey I'm good David thanks for having me so this is uh the first time that we've ever connected and it's been a while since I've done one of these like layer zero type episodes uh but these have always been in search of the spirit of communities

uh the spirit behind why people resonate with some of the systems that they find themselves in in crypto uh and so today I kind of want to explore the starkware Stark net uh starkers starkers what what what what would you call the people that um Vibe with the dark tribe yeah actually I don't think we have a common name we have a group of uh um a telegram group where we have most of the builders which is called Kyo cor stars but that's

pretty much it I don't think we have name we should fix that if you have some suggestions H yeah maybe it'll emerge sometime during uh this episode uh K Cairo co-stars what was it yeah Kyo call Stars yeah right because Cyro is the coding language for for right right right yeah maybe tell us a little bit about yourself uh how you came into crypto and then um what sparked interest specifically in in the starkware Stark net ecosystem yeah sure so before crypto

I was working in the fintech industry so in a in in a startup working on cloud-based payments basically enabling uh payments using contactless technology on the on the phone like NFC technology so I I I used to say that I was working with banks before fighting them um yes uh so then I I like I was working there uh I I have been working there for seven years basically building this payment infrastructure working on cryptographic stuff and so on and then in 2012 I

discovered Bitcoin playing a bit with it like running some nose looking at the code and whatnot but it was not sufficient to strike me and to say I want to to work on this space and whatnot so it was really in 2015 when I discovered ethereum uh right before the launch it was like a revelation to me uh I I was attending to a conference by Stefan chel about etherum uh and the vision and whatnot and it was really a revelation for me after this conference

I was I had only one idea I wanted to work on that space and and whatnot but you know initially I did not want to leave my company because I was attached to it and it was like a family company kind of so I tried first to convince them that there was something interesting to do with blockchain and ethereum especially because we were already connected to the banking industry and at this time it was pretty rare for web three projects to be connected to the banking industry so we did some experiments but then they were not convinced for them it was a

speculative bubble and for for me it was not so at some point after two years I gave up and I decided to leave and I join consensus basically uh so I stayed at consensus for three years mainly working as ethereum cor developer working on the bzu ethereum clients and my main achievement was working on EIP 1559 so I've been working on it for almost two years I have been champion in it on the technical side and working with steam beo and client teams and

whatnot so it was very interesting because I discovered a lot of the um interesting aspects not only technical aspects but also the governance of decentralized protocol and the fact that you have many different parties and they all have different interests and and whatnot like for example miners were really opposed to the CIP because it was reducing drastically their revenues so there was a lot of push back from Big mining pools and whatnot so uh I had to play with all of that and it was super interesting because and this is also the

the them of this layer zero episode it's also all about social layer and how to align interest between different parties working together on the same protocol so it was super interesting so you've been very close to the code but then also right like uh when you're so close to the code uh with the ethereum protocol especially uh there's just a lot of like part like social interests that emerge that uh you need to navigate how' you find your way way into the starware world yeah so then uh after the work on

e559 I I was a bit exhausted to be honest and I I had the wrong impression that I I I I did my on ethereum space like I had the impression that I disc played with all the different aspects and what not it was completely wrong actually but then at the same time I was also a bit uh interested by the interoperability vision of the cosmos ecosystem and this world where you can have different chains communicating together and so on so I I moved for a

year on Cosmos ecosystem but then uh I had a lot of disillusions basically on Cosmos ecosystem system mainly because of the social layer to be clear like the fact that there are many Cosmos projects but few of them really contribute back to the court stack and whatnot also many back-to-back agreements between foundations on different chains that end up concentrating the power and few actors in the whole ecosystem so I wanted to come back to the roots and come back to ethereum but then I thought

that maybe I had you know a significant experience on the layer one and I wanted maybe to do to do something and help ethereum scale so I I I wanted to do something on the layer to space so I started by doing a sort of analysis uh about the layer to landscape and uh try to play with the different Technologies and and whatnot and then my conclusion was that stock net was uh uh to me the most interesting and promising I was

really excited about this idea of stocket being very different and I guess we will talk about it a lot here but it was really something like okay the the idea that the the the evm when it was designed it was not designed to be ZK friendly back in the time of course because the ZK space was not that evolved and what not and now we have the choice between trying to make it ZK friendly or try to do something from scratch and do something optimized for this new uh technology that is uh the

zero knowledge space and I really like this idea and ultimately I like both idea I think we need both but I think there are too few projects trying this alternate path and I'm happy that stocket is doing that so then I I I I I started first a project building on stocket and then I I I met people from stock and whatnot and then I decided to to join starware to work on stocket B beautiful and you've you've been watching like the progress of the starkware Stark net uh Stark X ecosystem

so you kind kind of have been there at least witnessing from the beginning right yeah no not from the beginning the not too far after the beginning of stocket itself but yeah yeah like two years ago so it was really at the beginning of stocket yeah yeah yeah um from my perspective in ethereum the Stark start starting with starkware and some of the Stark X um at chains right and this is kind of where starkware really got its footprint with its dark X product that dydx uses or use

um so rare uses um they're like generalized chains but they're made by these one specific companies to serve their specific purpose right so dydx was the first derivatives platform um on on ethereum and they use the Stark x uh technology kind of like app specific dydx a oh Jesus app specific chain and there's a few other these right and so this is where like kind of Stark wear got its footprint got its foundation started like growing a little bit and like it was it was always to me in the

very beginning it was always in stark contrast to uh some of the slower uh projects that were growing on layer 2s the optimis which at the time was optimism and arbitrum because like Stark Stark wear kind of beat everyone to the punch when it came to like the layer 2 scaling philosophy but it was also like you said it was uh just not not interested in the evm because the evm couldn't serve its purposes so I've always thought like starkware was like pretty distant away from like ethereum it had its own culture its own Vibe like

optimism and arbitrum were fighting about like who's more ethereum aligned who's more evm equivalent and then Stark wear is are like f all that like we are I've always called like Stark wear as in like they are Stark Maxis they're about Starks uh they want to express Starks uh and they don't really want to bring in any of the ethereum baggage which like optimism and arbitrum are competing over uh and they just want to like build Starks that's kind of how I've Illustrated what the Stark net ecosystem starware ecosystem kind of like where it

started from how how do you reflect on that yeah it's funny and very interesting actually um it reminds me of the discussions we had on Twitter that initiated this about stocket being the least line the L2 and why it's funny for me specifically because I'm literally the one who is pushing a lot about the importance ofum alignment uh so now we use it as a meme because to serious I really believe it's the etherum alignment is important actually but I

just believe that we don't have the correct definition of the alignment I mean it's it's impossible to have a universal common definition of it but in my opinion for example specifically the execution engine should not be part of something that is important for the eum alignment even more on the contrary I think it's risky to consider that the evm compatibility is an important criteria for etherum alignment because it would kill completely Innovation and it will be potentially a systemic risk if everyone is doing Z KVM and it

happens that there is a big issue that we don't see right now it would be a systemic risk for ethereum because ethereum adopts a all up centri C map and so I believe eum alignment is very important but there are some aspects like that that I don't consider part of the eum alignment uh for example I'm more attached to the philosophical alignments basically the core values and principles of of ethereum and whatnot obviously economic alignment is important and on that I you mentioned something also that it will be

interesting to see uh how the token will play because it will be the first fee token that that is not it uh that I agree can be a bit disturbing for from the point of view of the economical alignment but to me the most important thing is to um to pay the security budget of ethereum and settle on ethereum and use it as da layer and whatnot so yeah yeah yeah yeah so like this is uh this conversation for listeners kind of started on on Twitter when I sent out like a i people probably

listeners know I shoot from the hip on Twitter um and I said that like Stark Stark it's going to be interesting to see Stark net like a not less ethereum aligned layer 2 which I think everyone kind of interpreted as they saw fit uh and which was my mistake because I left that very much up to interpretation back in the early days when we had like arbitrum and optimism and starkware Stark net like St like I said was just like the most distant in terms of the technology was distant the culture was like it was attracted a different set of Builders uh and like like I said it was

Stark net Stark Maxis like Stark's the the cryptography primitive uh and then also was interested in using Stark as the gas token and like if we rewind the clock and go back to like 2020 this was so incredibly Divergent from like what we were familiar with with optimism and arbitrum right um and then now we fast forward to today and like now those differences seem so trivial and small and marginal because like what is like ethereum misaligned has really like expanded into like some like absolute BS

uh but like it was a little bit of a uh when I like sent out that tweet and then got that push back from the Star NE ecosystem was like what the hell are you talking about David we're we are feel very ethereum aligned I was just like oh yeah really the evolution of the conversation of ethereum alignment has really moved on from just like not being evm equivalent and not using eth as gas now there's like a much different part of the spectrum so that's like kind of where my like perspective was coming from yeah yeah and now we use this meme a lot and we play with it it's even in my VI you know we also use some Emoji to

to to symbolize the list aligned Meme and whatnot so thank you for that because it's a powerful meme wait this turned into a meme yeah yeah yeah really yeah yeah really the whole like my like least aligned uh exactly it turned into a meme yeah yeah what's the emoji uh the Emoji is a compass for the alignment and the decreasing chart like to show that the alignment is decreasing yeah yeah I have it in my Twitter handle and many people in stet ecosystem as well because I tweeted that yeah oh my

god well okay for the record complete like not not necessarily misunderstanding but just like very poor communication and an incomplete idea being expressed from like pulled forward a Vibe like four years ago that yeah came in when you you bring forward like ethereum alignment from 2020 2024 things don't translate yeah no no but let's let me be clear there is no hard feelings or what not we just think that it's a good way actually to to show the difference of stocket and play with it because people then can question whether or not

we are serious when we say that and then it can lead to interesting discussion so there is no hard feelings it's a good meme actually okay okay but I also do want to get into like the shared identity like I said at the beginning of the starian Stark nans starkers um because there there is like a cultural difference uh between some of the I don't know what you would call like the ethereum vibe it's very diverse but like maybe some uh I don't know Kumbaya granola people of the ethereum uh ethereum layer one uh and then there's

like the Stark the starkers who are like you know pretty damn serious people um really into what the projects that they're building really into the expansion of starks uh and like sometimes you can like I'll be talking to somebody at a conference and I like I'll get kind of a Vibe like oh yeah you're you're a starkware person like I I can there's like a shared identity there can you like do your best to try and describe this in words like what would you say is the identity of starware yeah definitely and I think that part of it is related to the technical design choices actually like

for example I think really that the nonm compatibility played a big role in shaping this shared identity on the stocket ecosystem I will try to explain why first of of all I think it it's uh by default it makes builder in a mood where they think out of the box more naturally okay um also uh it's kind of a filter of motivation kind of why because you know there is no point in learning a new language and whatnot if you don't want to build something meaningful

because if you just want to do a low quality copy pasta of something else you can just take an evm project and deploy it on so many evm chains so I think it acts also as a motivation filter and people want to do meaningful stuff and also disruptive stuff like stuff that are very special and unique we see so a concrete element I think that we have a probably um uh younger people on average than on ethereum we have a lot of very young builders that are very interested

by some verticals that are uniquely enabled by stet or more powerful on stet for for example onchain gaming is one obvious one on stocket that is very developed and we have a lot of very young builders that really like onchain gaming and want to push the frontier of what we can do onchain and they understood that the the power of the chiro virtual machine can really unleash this potential so we have a big project I know you are familiar with it but it's dojo we they are building a an onchain

gaming engine so it's the equivalent of mud on optimism e system uh so and we have a lot of builders that who think out of the bust naturally I would say and they really understood that with those New Primitives they can explore new area and they they are not trying to copy past something that they see elsewhere usually they tend to more naturally innovate and do some crazy stuff like for example AI on chain like we have a project called Giza they are doing machine learning inference on

chain using Cairo and and whatnot so I I think this is one property that we have on on stocket ecosystem I think also by default they are U very much um attached to very core and lowlevel Tech and you know back in the days the the chairo stack and the stockness stack was very hard basically it was very low level the tooling was not great and whatnot and I think somehow it shaped uh the builders

in the ecosystem because they had to play with that and find different ways to to conciliate with this uh new and young ecosystem that is lacking a lot of tooling so they had to first to be patient and to try to overcome those difficulties and and whatnot so yeah I think it helped a lot to shape this shared identity one of the things that I thought was immensely interesting when I went to the starkware sessions in uh Tel Aviv in February of last year 2023 um it

was in the very early days of kind of the the Stark net independence from starkware like the community and builders that had been building on starkware and like using Starks and like learning about Cairo and then saw like Stark net as a thing I think there was test Nets up and running so people were building and and just getting there teeth teeth sharpened um they were also coming to the realization of oh we are the early people in Stark net this thing is going to be placed on our shoulders

uh and now is I'm not just a Dev anymore now I'm like a community Steward of something greater than myself I'm also I'm very close to the governance conversations there was a governance Workshop where people like literally sat in a circle like cross-legged and talked about like what governance will look like for Stark net moving forward there were a few community volunteers who had uh volunteered to be part of the Stark net Foundation to be Liaisons with the Stark net community and and it was like hey guys this is like up to us and nowhere and I don't really think think

anywhere anyone that I recognize from starkware were there like stewarding those conversations I think starkware did a fantastic job of finding the right people elevating them and say Hey you are community members you are also leaders um Shepherd everyone and then they're like uh okay sure I don't know what that looks like I need to go figure it out with everyone else and so in addition to the very technically competent like low-level builders that you were talking about there was also this was a year ago now there was also this like emerging realization of like there is this

massive Network that is going to be owned by us and people will all were all coming to learn about like what that meant for them it's like oh I'm not just a developer I'm now also like a governor a steward of this thing uh and that was my vibe the vibe check that I got like last February so a year ago and now like Stark net is an an alive ecosystem the Stark net token is dropped it's it's out there in the wild now it's not actually at the time of recording but it will be when this goes live um maybe you could like uh talk about the M maturation the progress the evolution of the community

around Stark net over the last year or so like how has that formed definitely so what you said is completely true uh they they are really involved a lot in the governance of the protocol and they are participating a lot in the life cycle of the the network uh another example is that uh last summer we did the a Special Assembly so there were there were 40 Builders gathered together in Paris in the castle we spent three days literally all together discussing

about many aspects of stocket including technical aspects including governance including the values and what not ethereum alignment actually we discussed we had a specific uh session about ethereum alignment and and and so on and it was amazing to see those people all together committing three days of their lives coming from different countries in the world all together United by a common goal and it's true that they are very much involved in that and it's more and more the case like there are more

committees in the foundation and people from the committee are really shering those like we have a gaming committee we have a defi committee uh we have people working on on governance and and all aspects and I think like also related to what we said before because you know everything had to be built from scratch um no one was afraid of building something that was missing and it ended up that we have very diverse stack basically by far the most diverse among

all al2s like we have five different full nodes implementations uh three three prover uh three sequencers um four different implementations of the chiro virtual machine and it's it's it's huge actually to have this level of decentralization of the stack so early uh where on all the different layer too because they can leverage already existing pieces on ethereum so it's not that they become lazy but by default you know they have something they can use where on stocket you have to build

everything from scratch RPC infrastructure everything tooling uh compilers and whatnot and so naturally we have now a very diverse stack beautiful yeah and I think when we look back on the history of and of crypto like the the maturation and development and growth of the Stark net system will just be like an insane case study of how how to spawn a network I don't think really will get like opportunities like this very often uh just to even watch this thing um can you talk a little bit

about just like how uh that decentralization process was able to be achieved over the last like one or two years uh like Community like first you had a community which was like already a huge Advantage but that also like by the leadership of you know people inside of the Stark net starware ecosystem um the community was like empowered uh and like you know given responsibility and which they accepted um and then also I think this is true so correct me if I'm wrong but like Stark tokens have actually been like distributed among

community members over the last like year or so selectively like very precisely granularly uh and that has also kind of aided in this story and like shown the community members like hey you actually will own this thing um even before the token is actually like out there uh maybe you can talk a little bit like illustrate some of this conversation yeah yeah definitely um so I think so the process of the decentralization was pretty gradual I would say but uh one of the it's true that the initial Kel of the community

played a very important role because it was so small at the beginning and everyone was uh everyone knew each other and whatnot so when you come you have directly some human interaction and it's very important actually it makes a big difference it's not only about uh reading some tutorials to La Cairo you had the opportunity to really talk to people to meet them in person to participate in hiker houses and stuff like that so and I think one thing we did great is to consolidate in few places first before scaling too fast

like for example we had very strategic places like in France for example we where we have a very strong Kel of very loyal and committed Builders so it started like with something like five people then 10 20 and then we stayed at this size for quite like six months or so and then they were really close to each other Etc and then it was really easier when we brought more people in the ecosystem they had Direct interactions with the community and they saw that the community was special and it was not only about starware or the

foundation but also about the network of humans working together on the same goal so not scaling too fast I think was played a big role and trying to focus on few area first before expanding in in in many different places at the same time and then naturally the community because initially it was small and they were close to each other that they played a big role and we included them um in all decision processes basically to gather

feedback for what they needed what were their pain points and whatnot we created for example a team that I'm leading which is the exploration team and the goal of this team is to start some open source projects and to work hand in hand with the community on those project and we pay them uh so they contribute and each time they do contribution to a project they get paid so and the goal is first of all to eat our own dog food so it's always better when you use your actual stack to understand the pain of the builders and and understand what

they need and whatnot and then it's also a good way to have some retention in the ecosystem because you know uh it's not about just having a onetime grant and then you do something but then you need to find a job uh you need to eat something basically and with this system they can stay in the ecosystem uh improve their skills continue to sharpen their skills and learn on actual projects and then once they are ready they can either find a job or create their own project and whatnot plus u

those projects the goal is at some point to give ownership to the community like for example the first one that we created is Kakarot which is a ZK VM built in k so it was an exploration project and then people from the community were actively involved in that and then we discussed with them and they wanted to take the lead on the project so we gave them the ownership we helped them to do a seed round and for example um and starware also invested in the seat vitalic as well and whatnot and now the project is fully autonomous and fully owned by the by the commune

members and whatnot so I think also this is something that helps because we really focus on giving them on power them and make making sure that they can stay and live comfortably on stocket because we don't want stocket is already a bet because it's not evm compatible you need to learn language so we don't want to accumulate the the the layers of risks for them so we try to make their lives easier and regarding the the distribution of the token um so actually it was pretty recently that we uh did