starks

According to GlobeNewswire, Intercont (Cayman) Limited (NASDAQ: NCT) announced the signing of a letter of intent to acquire a minority stake of less than 50% in Singapore's Web3 technology company Starks Network Ltd, and to jointly promote the development of the zCloakNetwork project, officially advancing the layout of on-chain digital asset infrastructure.The zCloak Network's business covers AI digital identity, enterprise-level self-custody wallets, stablecoin payments, and AI encryption payment technology, and has received investments from institutions such as Coinbase Ventures. The two parties will collaborate to apply Web3 technology to the digital transformation of payment and business processes in shipping and trade, accelerating the intelligent upgrade of the industry.As global stablecoin payment volumes are expected to surpass the combined total of Visa and Mastercard for the first time in 2024, the demand for compliant, secure, and scalable wallet infrastructure continues to grow among institutions. NCT stated that this acquisition is an important step in promoting the group's long-term strategy and exploring cross-industry layouts.NCT and Starks' leaders stated that this cooperation symbolizes "the Venetian merchants setting sail again on the blockchain." The two parties will jointly promote the implementation of enterprise-level Web3 technology in the global shipping and trade sectors.

ChainCatcher news, Vitalik Buterin published a new article titled "Exploring circle STARKs," which points out that Starkware can prove 620,000 Poseidon2 hashes per second on an M3 chip laptop. This means that if we are willing to trust Poseidon2 as a hash function, one of the most challenging parts of creating an efficient ZK-EVM has actually been solved.It states that compared to conventional STARKs, circle STARK does not introduce too much additional complexity for developers. The mathematical principles behind the "polynomials" operated by circle FRI are quite counterintuitive and take some time to understand and grasp. However, this complexity is precisely hidden, and developers remain unaware of it. The complexity of Circle's mathematical principles is encapsulated rather than systemic.Vitalik believes that by combining Mersenne31, BabyBear, and binary field technologies like Binius, we are approaching the efficiency limits of STARKs' "base layer"; it is expected that the frontier of STARK optimization will shift towards the most efficient arithmetic of primitives such as hash functions and signatures (and optimizing these primitives themselves for this purpose), creating recursive structures for more parallelization, arithmetic for virtual machines to improve developer experience, and other higher-level tasks.

Chain Catcher news, Starkscan announced the launch of the StarkNet block explorer, which supports viewing the status and transaction information of both the testnet and mainnet, and can also display Received and Pending transactions along with estimated times. (Source link)