This Ethereum Layer-2 Soultion That Promises 100x Lower Gas Fees Just Went Live

A Layer-2 solution that aims at addressing Ethereum’s ETH/USD high transaction fee issues just went live.

What Happened: StakWare, the developer of StarkNet — a permissionless decentralized ZK-Rollup — announced a strategic partnership with Alchemy Platform — a blockchain developer platform on Monday.

“StarkNet offers users higher throughput and gas fees 100x lower than those of Layer 1s - all while maintaining the security, decentralization, and composability of Ethereum-based networks,” said Alchemy in a blog post.

Layer 2 solutions also known as “roll-ups” process transactions separately from Ethereum’s blockchain and write the record to the blockchain in a bundle from time to time. This reduces transaction costs for high volumes.

See Also: How To Buy Ethereum (ETH)

Why It Matters: Ethereum transaction fees, also known as gas fees, shot skyward last year with the rising popularity of decentralized finance, non fungible tokens and smart contracts. 

The gas fee has since fallen; the average Ethereum transaction fee stood at 0.0043 ETH or $10.92 at press time, according to BitInfoCharts. Last year in July, the average transaction fee was $69.92.

Alchemy said its vision was to “bring Web3 to billions of people around the world by making it easy for any developer anywhere to build on blockchain.”

Alchemy’s customers are varied and include cryptocurrency exchanges, banks, and Web 3 names — such as Cryptokitties, Opensea, and Trust Wallet. 

StarkNet is underpinned by zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, which offer faster computations than rival optimistic rollups.

Price Action: At press time, ETH traded 0.5% lower at $2,523.93 over 24 hours.

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