Original text: The Starknet 'Bolt' upgrade: 2-second txs are here
Translation and proofreading: Starknet Chinese Community
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Quick Facts
v0.13.2 introduces two new features to prepare Starknet for the future.
“Parallel execution” can execute independent transactions simultaneously, greatly improving Starknet’s current processing capabilities.
“Block packaging” will reduce fixed L1 costs by up to 66%, and shorten transaction confirmation time to two seconds and block time to 20-60 seconds.
introduction
Starknet makes it possible to build any dApp on Ethereum, regardless of the computing power required. The v0.13.2 upgrade, called “Bolt” by the community, accelerates transaction confirmation times and will be available in Starknet’s 2024 update. Based on the cost savings and performance optimizations planned in the roadmap , it expands its processing capabilities for future use cases. What are the two main features of this upgrade? Let's take a look at "parallel execution" and "block packaging".
As the name implies, “ parallel execution ” enables transactions in the Starknet sequencer to be executed simultaneously, greatly expanding the network capacity far beyond current needs to support future use cases. In short, this means that transaction confirmation times will be significantly increased due to the increase in speed. Interesting fact: Starknet is the first L2 project to implement parallel transactions on the mainnet.
Block Packaging brings faster L2 transaction confirmation time, with about 80% of transactions confirmed in just 2 seconds, and the fixed L1 cost of each block can be reduced by up to 66%. The L2 block generation time will be shortened to Around 20-60 seconds. It achieves this by decoupling L2 block frequency from L1 cost.
Sounds cool, right? Let’s dig into the details.
Making Starknet ready for the future
We mentioned that parallel execution can expand network capacity, even far beyond the current needs of the network. So, how is it achieved?
Until now, Starknet’s sequencer has executed transactions in sequence and then packaged them into a block. This execution method operates efficiently without placing an excessive burden on the Starknet network capacity.
But Starknet is building the web of the future. An important part of that is expanding the network’s capacity as much as possible to accommodate future application activity that will inevitably require higher computing power.
Parallel execution greatly expands the capacity of the network by allowing the sequencer to execute multiple independent transactions simultaneously. The following are examples of transactions that can be executed in parallel:
Transaction A : Bob sends ETH to Alice.
Transaction B : Sebastian sends STRK to Bill.
These transactions are independent of each other and do not need to wait in line to be executed in sequence. Instead, they can be executed in parallel. This greatly speeds up the speed at which the sequencer executes transactions.
But what if Bob needs to convert his STRK to ETH before sending it to Alice?
Transaction A : Bob converts STRK to ETH.
Transaction B : Bob sends ETH to Alice.
In this case, Transaction B depends on Transaction A because Bob needs to receive ETH before he can send it to Alice. If Transaction B is executed before Transaction A, then Bob may not have enough ETH in his wallet to send to Alice. Alice, the transaction will fail.
The additional network capacity brought by parallel execution ensures that transactions on Starknet remain fast and efficient even as new use cases emerge and demand on the network increases.
Release higher block frequency
Parallel execution improves the efficiency of the transaction execution phase, while block packaging improves the efficiency of subsequent steps after packaging transactions into blocks.
This new feature actually applies the "packaging" logic to the block itself, merging multiple blocks into a super block, thereby spreading the L1 cost over more transactions and achieving the balance between L2 block frequency and L1 cost. Decoupling.
In layman’s terms, this means faster block generation times and lower costs per transaction .
To understand how this works, it is important to note that the cost of operating L1 is fixed, and increases linearly with the frequency at which L1 receives blocks from L2, regardless of how many transactions those blocks contain. Blocks require a certain amount of gas (currently at least 215,000 gas per block). Therefore, the more frequently L2 sends blocks to L1, the higher the cost.
If you don’t want to wait until the block is full, but settle blocks on L1 at a shorter interval (on Starknet, the block generation interval is every 6 minutes regardless of whether the block is full or not), it means you need Make a trade-off between cost and speed.
So how do we avoid this trade-off?
Block packaging solves this problem by packaging multiple L2 blocks into a special application recursive proof. Through block packaging, each Starknet state update will process multiple Starknet blocks, thus achieving L1 fixed cost. Batch processing. As a result, block generation time is shortened without adding additional costs.
The result is faster confirmation time and lower L1 costs. Through block packaging, transaction confirmation only takes 20-60 seconds (the goal is to reduce it to 2 seconds). In terms of cost, most of the fixed L1 costs are now distributed to Across all packed blocks, these costs were reduced by 50-66%.
The added benefit of block packing is that as more users join Starknet, the cost will further decrease, not increase, because it means more L2 blocks can be packed per recursive proof applied. As users join the network, each user’s single L1 footprint decreases, ensuring that Starknet’s exceptional scalability can truly be realized.
Conclusion
The v0.13.2 upgrade pushes the boundaries of current scalability and prepares Starknet for future large-scale applications. Parallel execution enables independent transactions to be executed simultaneously, increasing network capacity beyond current needs and paving the way for future network expansion. Block packaging unlocks frequent block generation while optimizing gas consumption.
For more technical details, see the Community Forum post on Parallel Execution and Block Packaging, or follow the Starknet Twitter/X for more updates.
