Starknet’s Cairo-native appchain launch shifts L2 vertical scaling

Native execution replaces VM emulation

Starknet moves from virtual machine emulation to native execution this month. This shift uses MLIR and LLVM to compile Sierra programs into optimized machine-level instructions. The sequencer processes transactions faster by running programs directly on the operating system in the CPU’s native instruction set, which removes the processing overhead found in previous virtual machine emulation methods. Developers launch custom Starknet instances to suit specific needs using the Starknet stack. These appchains let users configure block size, latency, data availability mode, and consensus mechanisms. Starknet recorded an average of 127 transactions per second in October. Transaction fees averaged $0.002 per transaction during these periods. Before the current launch, StarkWare’s StarkEx powered successful L2 appchains like dYdX and Sorare. StarkEx settled $1T in cumulative trading and processed over 500 million transactions. The Cairo language is Rust-like and ergonomic. The H1 2026 upgrade, v0.14.2, introduced SNIP-36 to enable in-protocol proof verification. This technical prerequisite allows transactions to reference off-chain execution proofs directly. Do you think the overhead of dual-execution will hinder this transition?

Component	Entity	Status
Full Node	Equilibrium	In production
Sequencer	StarkWare	In production
Madara	Community	In development
LC Prover	LambdaClass	In development

Immutable scales gaming with L3 rollups

Immutable expands to become a cross-rollup liquidity platform built on StarkNet. This expansion follows the $200 million Series C financing led by Temasek. The integration allows players to trade assets matched across multiple Ethereum Layer 2 and Layer 3 rollups. This solves the liquidity fractionalization problem that exists with individual rollups today. Immutable provides Layer 3s to games with more than 10 million active users that require dedicated throughput. These games avoid competing for capacity with other applications. Developers deploy custom, composable smart contracts to migrate L1 games to Immutable. This migration enables users to own in-game items through a high-performance environment. The protocol facilitates hundreds of thousands of transactions per second to support millions of daily players. Immutable enables 9,000 transactions per second for trading and minting NFTs. Immutable supports games like Gods Unchained and Guild of Guardians.

Infrastructure and technical limitations

The Starknet stack includes components like the Madara sequencer and the LambdaClass prover. The Madara sequencer uses Substrate for decentralized consensus. LambdaClass builds a stack comprising a prover, a sequencer, an execution engine, and a network explorer. The sequencer uses native artifacts for speed, but the prover still relies on the Cairo VM to execute transactions step-by-step to ensure that the results can be proven to the STARK verifier on Ethereum. This creates a dual-execution workflow that requires rigorous testing to ensure outcomes match. Even with these technical complexities, the Starknet ecosystem attracts builders via native Account Abstraction and high throughput. The engineering effort includes 45 community developers who produced over 740 commits and over 400 merged PRs. This effort produced a sequencer compatible with public Starknet with a configurable mempool. The community development effort for the Madara sequencer began in February 2023.