0xProject to team up with StarkWare to increase DEX efficiency

San Francisco-based decentralized exchange (DEX) startup 0x is partnering with the Israeli software-as-service company StarkWare to test a zero-knowledge proof solution called StarkDEX, which can process roughly 500 transactions per second. Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a cryptographic solution championed by ZCash. It can be used to speed up a DEXs which have always been notoriously slow.

0x marketing lead Matt Taylor said:

”Our goal is that by the end of this year we’ll have this in production, on mainnet, so that people can actually use this technology. … We intend to have this be a core part of the 0x DEX stack.”

Taylor added that since its foundation in 2017, the company has facilitated $713,000 worth of trades. Presently, DEXs using 0x handle between a few hundred and roughly 3,100 trades a day. Commenting on these scalability challenges, StarkWare CEO Uri Kolodny said: 

“A marketplace where only three trades per second can be settled is a very illiquid market.”

Kolodny concedes that it will take months before this alpha test leads to a professional service for 0x relayers and other blockchain companies. StarkWare attracted investment from ConsenSys Ventures like Vitalik Buterin and the Zcash company. Taylor also revealed that 0x plans to use StarkDEX solutions to “scale our infrastructure as well as the infrastructure for the rest of the crypto economy.”