Upcoming Starknet versions

Starknet Alpha v0.12.0

What to expect

Starknet’s roadmap for 2023 is focussed on performance and user experience.

The upcoming version 0.12.0 of Starknet is focused on enhancing the network’s throughput to improve scale and transaction latency. To achieve this, a new Rust implementation has been introduced for the sequencer. The sequencer contains more efficient local storage and critical path logic implemented, aimed at significantly reducing wait times for transaction confirmations and addressing network congestion issues.

Notable changes

While there are minimum changes at the protocol level, the upcoming version introduces significant improvements to the sequencer.

Here are some notable changes to expect:

Sequencer performance

The new sequencer’s performance will benefit from the following three enhancements:

  • Cairo-rs: Cairo VM in Rust

  • The blockifier: a transaction execution framework available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.

  • Local state management of the sequencer will use Papyrus storage.

Removal of pending status

The PENDING transaction status will be removed in v0.12.0.

  • In Starknet, the pending block is a valid block that was executed by the sequencer but is not yet full and more transactions might be added to it.

  • In v0.12.0, the status for transactions in the pending block will be changed from PENDING to ACCEPTED_ON_L2 to reflect their finality status.

Block hash syscall

In v0.12.0, a new syscall will be added that will allow contracts to fetch the block hashes of older blocks (similar to blockhash in Solidity).

  • The syscall will allow access to past blocks in the range (current block-10, current block - 1024).

  • In v0.12.0, the Starknet OS will not prove the correctness of those block hash returned by the syscall. This is temporary and will be proven in the final version of the Starknet OS.