BlockBeats Report, on October 24th, LambdaClass, which previously helped Starknet complete V12 and cairoVM development, announced a new strategic cooperation agreement with zkSync, focusing on vertical fields in the ecosystem, such as enhancing the ZK Stack and introducing applications to zkSync. LambdaClass also stated that some top engineers have joined the zkSync team in the past few days.

If you are interested in the latest developments in the zk industry, you may know that LambdaClass and Starknet had a long-term partnership.

LambdaClass is an engineering team from Argentina that focuses on solving technical challenges for companies that are expanding and innovating. They are committed to solving problems related to distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, and cryptography.

Previously, when Starknet v0.12.0 mainnet went live and the Quantum Leap upgrade was implemented, news emerged that the highest TPS approached 100 and transaction latency remained within 10 seconds. At that time, LambdaClass was mentioned by the official Starknet social media account as having played a crucial role in achieving such remarkable technological progress through their collaboration.

However, now LambdaClass has turned to the competitor of Starknet, zkSync. What happened in between?

LambdaClass terminated its partnership with Starknet as early as the beginning of August.

Although LambdaClass announced its partnership with zkSync today, as early as August 3rd, LambdaClass published an article titled "The Future of LambdaClass and the Starknet Foundation" on its website announcing the termination of its partnership with Starknet.

"After EthCC, we decided to review some of the decisions we made over the past two years. We believe that Starknet has the most vibrant community and the best technology. That's why we plan to continue all engineering work, but we hope to be able to act quickly and independently of Starkware and the Foundation when making decisions. We highly value freedom of thought and speech and will continue to express ourselves as we have in the past. We believe this will keep us honest. This is part of the open source culture we believe in, which has brought us to where we are today."

"As of today (August 3, 2023), we have decided to terminate our agreement with the foundation, but remain committed to collaborating before December 31, 2023. We hope to achieve some technical goals."

We will continue to be a part of the Starknet ecosystem and help shape the future of the network by building core infrastructure, products, and communities. We are driven to become a part of the decentralized future of Starknet by running sorters, verifiers, and staking services.

From the above article, it can be seen that LambdaClass announced the decision to terminate its partnership with Starknet in a very dignified manner. However, the most crucial sentence "We hope to be able to act quickly and independently of Starkware and the Foundation" has indicated that there were problems in this friendly partnership.

LambdaClass has been developing for Starknet in the past

In the "breakup statement", LambdaClass mentioned that they had signed a 6-year cooperation agreement with Starknet Foundation in July 2023. It can be seen that this cooperation still had a long way to go, just like before.

StarkWare, the parent company of Starknet, has developed the Cairo language and CairoVM for more efficient proof generation. LambdaClass, in addition to being a contributor to the development of Starknet V12, is also responsible for the development of cairoVM in the Go language.

LambdaClass CEO Federico Carrone stated on social media that "the team of engineers completed the coding of cairoVM in less than two months."

Before this, LambdaClass also developed cairo-rs and starknet_in_rust. When Starknet V0.12.0 went live, the throughput soared from an average of 30K Cairo steps per second (CSPS) in v0.11.0 to 220K CSPS in the new version, thanks to the optimization of the Sequencer and the use of cairo-rs developed by LambdaClass, which enhanced the execution of Cairo contracts.

In July, Starknet released an official update document stating that LambdaClass is building a Starknet technology stack, which will ultimately include a prover, a sorter, an execution engine, and a network browser. In the near future, these different components may be integrated with other components of the Starknet technology stack to form a running instance of Starknet.

In addition to leading the development work for zk Starknet, LambdaClass has also launched an offensive in the gaming field. LambdaClass is currently developing an open-source multiplayer combat game, and LambdaClass CEO Federico even stated that "in 2-3 years, Lambda will become an outstanding game studio."

LambdaClass and zkSync Collaboration Details

Returning to the collaboration between LambdaClass and zkSync, according to official sources, this partnership will include joint work on application versions and stack improvements on zkSync. LambdaClass CEO Federico shared the official announcement, stating that this collaboration will involve "infrastructure, applications, and community" aspects. Apart from this, no further details have been disclosed, with the official statement only mentioning that there will be more project updates in the near future.

In fact, LambdaClass had participated in the development of zkSync before the announcement of the cooperation. In early September, LambdaClass opened the official account of Lambda zkSync to announce the project content report of the cooperation and stated that it is committed to releasing the first version of Rust SDK for ZKSync.

On October 20th, the zkSync development team Matter Labs announced that GRVT, a hybrid encrypted trading platform that completed two rounds of financing with a valuation of $39 million and $7.1 million, will provide a user experience similar to Robinhood and self-custody functions of decentralized trading platforms such as Uniswap. It will become the first "hyperchain" in the zkSync ecosystem, a custom blockchain that will run as Layer 3 Validium in the zkSync ecosystem.

LambdaClass CEO Federico forwarded a tweet from Omar, the business manager of zkSync's ecosystem, expressing his honor to participate in this collaboration. Based on the project content of zkSync "hyperchain" and the business background of LambdaClass, it can be inferred that LambdaClass is responsible for the development work of "hyperchain" in this collaboration.

On X, there are many "LambdaClass Starknet" matrix accounts. The official account of LambdaClass's Starknet team has three times as many fans as the zkSync team. This partnership has just begun, and we look forward to seeing what kind of technological sparks will be created in the future.

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