The decentralized self sustaining group for Starknet, a layer-2 blockchain built on Ethereum, started vote casting Thursday on whether or no longer to approve its most up-to-date protocol give a enhance to for mainnet deployment.

The vote ends on Jan. 8 at 12 p.m. UTC and at press time, all votes forged were in prefer of deploying Starknet Alpha v0.13.0.

The give a enhance to has two key parts: considerably lowering transaction expenses and laying the groundwork for users to make use of Starknet’s native token STRK as funds for their gas consumption, per a neighborhood discussion board post.

The deployment might presumably well be an thrilling original step for the layer-2 blockchain, Carlos Mercado, an files scientist at blockchain analytics company Flipside Crypto, stated to Unchained over Telegram, however mighty that the vote “is most frequently symbolic.” The give a enhance to “is a closed vote, as the STRK token launched in 2022 and most provocative has round 430 holders (per Etherscan), a range of which can presumably well be delegating to key ecosystem gamers.”

The vote comes decrease than a month after Starknet deployed the give a enhance to on the Goerli and Sepolia testnets. The total label locked in Starknet’s trim contracts currently stands at $141 million, per files from layer-2 watchdog, L2Beat.

Starknet is a rollup designed to scale the Ethereum blockchain without compromising on security and composability. It uses zero-files proofs, which can presumably well be “cryptographic proofs that verify files without revealing any files concerning the tips itself,” wrote head of overview Christine Kim in a Galaxy document.

“The crypto house is on the frontier of very extra special technologies fancy zero-files proofs,” wrote Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in a Dec. 28 weblog post. “Zero-files proofs, a technology we thought modified into a long time away, are now right here, are an increasing form of developer-friendly, and are on the cusp of being usable for client applications.”