Name of your project: Benchmarking Stylus: StarkEx Verifier
Link to your Questbook application: Benchmarking Stylus: StarkEx Verifier
Link to your website/socials, others: GitHub
Previous Stylus-EVM benchmarks confirmed Stylus’s gas efficiency for isolated, computationally intensive tasks. This proposal aims to extend that analysis with a sophisticated, real-world benchmark. Specifically, it will compare the gas costs of StarkEx’s on-chain STARK verification logic against its equivalent implemented in Rust and deployed on Stylus.
This code repository aims to benchmark the gas costs between EVM and Stylus contracts for GpsStatementVerifier.verifyProofAndRegister functionality.
Performance Against KPIs
Qualitative Impact & Community Feedback
The project successfully demonstrated that Arbitrum Stylus can replicate the full StarkEx verification pipeline — from verifyProofAndRegister in GpsStatementVerifier through memory page validation, constraint polynomial evaluation, and FRI verification — in a way that is both faithful to the original Solidity implementation and adapted to Rust’s computational model.
This means we have proven that complex, computation-heavy verification logic (like zk-STARK proof checking) can be ported from Solidity to Rust under Stylus without loss of correctness, while preserving the modular workflow (GpsStatementVerifier → CpuVerifier → CpuConstraintPoly → FRI).
The key outcome is therefore not only gas savings (quantitative), but the validation that Stylus is a viable execution environment for industrial-grade zero-knowledge verifiers, opening the door for real-world adoption in ecosystems already depending on StarkEx.
Twitter thread about the grant completion: https://x.com/LimeChainHQ/status/1968310359221297202
Financial Summary
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Milestone 1. Research how to port over auxiliary contracts: 17% budget allocation
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Milestone 2. Translate Memory Management Logic: 20% budget allocation
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Milestone 3. Translate Auxiliary Contracts: 18% budget allocation
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Milestone 4. Translate STARK verification logic: 35% budget allocation
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Milestone 5. Deploy, test and compare contracts: 10% budget allocation
Future Plans & Continued Ecosystem Alignment
LimeChain has contributed to the creation of the Stylus kit, as well as delivering a few benchmark projects. We are looking forward to continuing our contributions to Stylus and overall improving the overall Arbitrum developer experience.