Starstream Has the Potential to Become a Core Component of Cardano's Future

The founder of Cardano has offered a brief glimpse into the part that Starstream would play in the future of the Layer-1 blockchain.

While he did not share specifics, Charles Hoskinson took to X to inform his followers that “Starstream has the potential to become a core component of Cardano’s future.”

This statement follows his recent participation in the Starstream Working Group.

The initiative to enhance the performance of blockchains through new execution environments has seen an influx of interest from institutions in recent times.

Highlighting this trend, Sebastien Guillemot, the co-founder of crypto ecosystem builder dcSpark and an early advocate of the Starstream initiative, confirmed Hoskinson’s involvement.

In his post, Guillemot also noted that the Starstream Working Group has grown "significantly" within two weeks.

Estimating the increase at approximately 50%, he capped the interest in the initiative.

This is a new zero-knowledge (ZK) Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based on UTXO. It is expected to provide simpler and more powerful integrations compared to earlier versions.

Guillemot posted a video on X demonstrating how the design of this UTXO-based virtual machine aligns with ZK cryptography, which is widely recognized as a major advancement in privacy-preserving computation.

Starstream is expected to provide simpler and more powerful integrations than earlier versions. It is also more powerful and provides a level ofoperability that renders it capable of handling more complex use cases.

This initiative is catering for a setback that Cardano has encountered with some implementation challenges, especially with advanced cryptography.

Starstream uses a WebAssembly-based VM that generates a ZK Proof for every smart contract interaction to resolve them.

This way, computations are verified efficiently without the need to reveal underlying data, which ultimately directly addresses previous limitations.

With transactions being batched for nearly free and use cases like Oracles, gaming, real-world assets, and stablecoins becoming simpler, the system contributes to enhancing performance.

Apart from this integration, Cardano has made some other notable advancements.

The Cardano Midnight Network sidechain has gained significant traction in the last few months.

As a protocol, keenly focused on data protection and privacy, this sidechain could serve as a foundational platform for blockchain-based equity issuance, per Hoskinson’s projection.

His optimism is fueled by Midnight’s privacy, programmability, and interoperability features, which Hoskinson says are critical to bringing traditional stock markets onto blockchain systems.