Starcoin 2.0 Soft Launch Coming Soon: Exploring the Path to Scalability (Part 1)

4 min readJun 18, 2024

As the blockchain industry continues to progress, technical bottlenecks and the “trilemma” problem have become critical challenges that demand breakthroughs. Overcoming these challenges requires deep research and innovation to inject new vitality into the industry. Although the PoW consensus mechanism is renowned for its decentralization, its ecosystem scalability solutions are limited, resulting in underutilized development potential. As the only public blockchain based on an enhanced Nakamoto PoW consensus mechanism and using the Move language for smart contracts, Starcoin has been dedicated to innovative practices in PoW ecosystem scalability since its inception in 2020. In 2023, we achieved significant progress in our tests by introducing high-performance parallelization technology, resulting in a hundredfold increase in TPS.

In this ever-evolving industry, Starcoin faced an unprecedented challenge. However, with the crisis now nearing resolution, the team has decided to implement a comprehensive upgrade to scalability technologies, aiming to restore Starcoin’s value.

Innovative Blockchain Starcoin

Launched in 2020, Starcoin is the only public blockchain based on an enhanced Nakamoto PoW consensus mechanism and using the Move language for smart contracts. Since the mainnet launch in May 2021, we have continuously innovated in performance and scalability to meet the demands of Web3 applications. Starcoin’s vision is to create a decentralized and inclusive digital ecosystem, enabling users to seamlessly participate in the digital economy. We are committed to fostering innovation and collaboration, building a new network based on decentralization, transparency, and trustlessness, paving the way for the large-scale application of Web3.

Breakthrough Technological Achievements

1. Clear Ownership of State Storage

Starcoin’s state storage adopts an account model similar to Ethereum, where all users’ states form a state tree mapped by addresses. Starting from the genesis state, new states are generated by advancing transactions as input information, creating new state trees. This design offers high flexibility but results in unclear contract state ownership, posing security issues and the “state explosion” problem.

Starcoin has made the following improvements based on the Ethereum account model:

Discontinued contract accounts, allowing any account to deploy smart contracts, which are deployed under the current account;
Changed the state storage mechanism in the smart contract programming language, making it easy for developers to distribute the contract states to the user addresses they belong to, clarifying state ownership.

This modification enhances the chain’s ability to protect user state security and allows for the expansion of state billing functions.

2. Easy Gas

Traditional networks use native tokens as the payment method for Gas fees, causing inconvenience when users’ accounts lack native tokens. Starcoin’s Easy Gas allows users to pay Gas fees using any supported token within the Starcoin network, simplifying the transaction process and making it more user-friendly.

Combining this function with Starcoin DAO governance ensures flexible and democratic decisions regarding eligible Gas payment tokens. This innovation fundamentally changes how Gas fees are handled, making it easier for users and developers to use Gas fees, reducing transaction constraints, and enhancing network transaction scalability.

3. On-Chain Governance: DAO

Starcoin DAO promotes decentralized governance through on-chain mechanisms, establishing a more inclusive, transparent, and efficient governance model. The proposal process is streamlined and user-friendly, with decisions and transactions being publicly transparent, allowing all community members to participate in network governance.

Starcoin DAO achieves:

Security and Transparency: On-chain governance ensures transparency and security, with all decisions and transactions recorded transparently and tamper-proof;
Efficiency: Direct governance simplifies the decision-making process, eliminating intermediaries and reducing bureaucratic delays;
Community Empowerment: Each token holder can vote, strengthening community cohesion and allowing every member to voice opinions on the network’s future development.

Additionally, Starcoin has made innovations in formal verification, economic models, consensus management, smart contract security upgrades, and state billing, laying the foundation for scalable ecosystem applications and network performance.

Starcoin 2.0 Soft Launch Coming Soon

Starcoin 2.0 mainnet is fully prepared, and a scalable network that combines decentralization and security is about to launch, bringing new development opportunities to our community.

In Starcoin 2.0, we introduced TurboSTM parallel processing technology to address the bottleneck of traditional single-threaded smart contract execution. Meanwhile, we upgraded the PoW Nakamoto consensus with the FlexiDAG structure, speeding up block production and reducing transaction confirmation times, significantly enhancing Starcoin’s performance. The launch of the Starcoin 2.0 mainnet marks another leap in Starcoin’s path of blockchain technology innovation. Starcoin is not only creating an efficient and scalable blockchain infrastructure but also contributing to the Web3 digital life of billions of people in the future.

Starcoin’s original intention remains unchanged: we are committed to building a decentralized and scalable digital ecosystem, serving the development and users of Web3 applications. Despite the challenges, Starcoin continues to innovate and build. The Starcoin 2.0 mainnet is coming soon. Stay tuned for more exciting updates and keep following us!

About Starcoin

Starcoin provides the utmost security from the origin via its enhanced PoW consensus and Secure smart contract, using the language of Move. Through layered and flexible interoperability, it optimizes the building of ecosystems such as DeFi, NFTs, Gaming, etc., with higher efficiency and convenience. This process redefines value by empowering every participant in the ecosystem to enjoy the multiplication of values.

Follow Starcoin on social media to stay up to date with all the latest developments.