Author: Brayden Lindrea, CoinTelegraph; Translated by: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

StarkWare CEO Eli Ben Sasson said he expects transaction speeds on the company’s Ethereum Layer 2, Starknet, to increase fourfold over the next three months, while fees will drop “fivefold.”

Ben Sasson said at DevCon 2024 in Bangkok last week that improvements to the network will mainly come from “better compilation and faster execution” on Cairo, Starknet’s native smart contract language.

Data from Solana Compass shows that Starknet will cross the 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) milestone and compete with the likes of Solana, which typically handles 800 to 1,050 non-voting TPS.

Ben Sasson asserts that Starknet’s TPS will exceed 1,000 or more in the next “three months.”

“You can take it to the bank.”

Ben Sasson added that the already cheap Starknet fees will also be significantly reduced.

“[Our] transactions on Starknet should be 5x cheaper, which could make it the cheapest L2.”

Lowering fees is a priority for Ben Sasson’s company as it expects blockchain activity to boom and cause “gas prices and block prices to surge.”

StarkWare CEO Eli Ben Sasson. Source: Cointelegraph

On November 12, Ben Sasson’s company confirmed that while Starknet can handle 200 or more TPS for short periods of time, its average network record on October 29 was 129 TPS.

Starknet actually peaked at 857 TPS around the same time, though this was achieved during a controlled stress test.

Meanwhile, network fees on Starknet remain “ultra-low,” with a median of $0.002 per transaction.

According to Starknet’s Dune Analytics dashboard, Starknet is currently the third cheapest Ethereum Layer 2, behind Optimism and Blast, at $0.0013 and $0.002 respectively.

Other Dune Analytics data shows that all three Ethereum Layer 2s have been cheaper than Solana over the past 30 days, with their average non-voting transaction fees fluctuating between $0.001 and $0.11 over the past two months.

StarkWare also hopes to bring the OP_CAT improvement proposal to Bitcoin, which would make Starknet the first layer 2 to be natively deployed on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Ben Sasson expects the upgrade to go live within the next 12 months.