Protocol Overview

Starknet is a decentralized ZK-rollup that scales Ethereum by moving computation off-chain and verifying its correctness on-chain. Let’s walk through the protocol, from user interaction to proof verification, to see how it all works:

Everything starts with an account. On Starknet, accounts are smart contracts — a model known as native account abstraction. This allows for flexible authorization logic like multisig, session keys, or passkey-based authentication, all without changes to the protocol itself.

When users want to interact with the network, they send transactions. These invoke contract functions, deploy new contracts, or register new classes, which are all collected and ordered into blocks.

Some transactions involve communication between Ethereum and Starknet. These are handled through L1↔L2 messaging, allowing asynchronous messages to be passed between contracts on L1 and L2, and enabling secure bridges, cross-layer governance, and composability between chains.

All of this activity updates Starknet’s global state. The state includes contract storage, class declarations, and account data — all organized in a Merkle Patricia trie. Every transaction modifies this state, and each new state root reflects the cumulative result of those changes.

To ensure that state transitions are valid, Starknet generates cryptographic proofs for the validity. These proofs compress the entire block’s execution into a succinct, verifiable artifact. They’re submitted to Ethereum, where they’re verified onchain so Ethereum can trust Starknet’s execution without re-running it.

But Ethereum needs more than just a proof — it needs access to the data involved. Starknet ensures this through data availability, publishing compressed state diffs to Ethereum so the full state can be reconstructed and verified.

All of this — computation, proof generation, and L1 publishing — requires payment. That’s where fees come in. Users pay fees to cover the cost of using network resources, and these fees are paid in STRK, Starknet’s native token.

STRK is also used to power Starknet’s own proof-of-stake consensus protocol. Validators selected from STRK stakers help secure the sequencing layer and validate block production. This mechanism is designed to support decentralization and provide economic guarantees around block inclusion and ordering.

All together, these components form a tightly integrated protocol. Starknet enables scalable, expressive applications with low fees and strong security — all without compromising on decentralization or Ethereum alignment.