StarkNet Alpha is Coming to Mainnet

We announced our vision for StarkNet at the beginning of the year: to bring massive scalability to Ethereum while preserving L1 security, permissionless interactions, and decentralization.
We released StarkNet Alpha on a public testnet in June. This version supported fully permissionless general computation smart contracts. We’ve since upgraded it twice: first to Alpha 1 — providing L1<>L2 messaging and on-chain data, and then to Alpha 2 — supporting composability.

StarkNet Alpha 2 now supports composable smart contracts of general computation in an Ethereum-like state, with the ability for L1 and L2 contracts to interact with each other. Read more here.

Because StarkNet is still under development, we want to introduce capabilities in a stepwise fashion and ensure developer expectations are met at every single step. Two particularly important aspects we’d like to emphasize are:

• Permissioned smart contract deployment: We will follow the sensible playbook introduced by our Optimistic Rollup colleagues: start with permissioned contract deployment. The protocol specifying how to request the inclusion of your smart contract in this initial whitelist will be published in the coming weeks.
• No guarantee for backward compatibility: we expect the future transition from StarkNet Alpha to StarkNet Beta to include regenesis of the state. The network will begin from block 0, and applications will have to redeploy their contracts. Furthermore, developers and users should note that the expected StarkNet Beta might not be backward compatible with StarkNet Alpha, e.g. developers might need to modify their contracts. Obviously, we will try to allow an easy transition for applications, with minimal required changes.

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