StarkWare co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson said he agrees with Ethereum’s decision to move in the direction of STARKs, described here as hash-based SNARKs, but argued that the framing left out two important points and included one misleading claim. In a post on X, he said the debate between STARKs and SNARKs has been going on for years, with much of the related research previously led by StarkWare and funded by the Ethereum Foundation. He also said small binary fields were introduced to the zero-knowledge proof field in the 2018 ZK-STARK paper, rather than being original to Binius and Flonk. Ben-Sasson added that prime-field STARKs do not require large primes, pointing to Stwo’s use of the 31-bit prime field M31 as an efficient example. He further argued that binary-field multiplication performs poorly on GPUs, while multiplication over small prime fields such as M31 is more efficient, which he said could create hard-to-overcome challenges for GPU designs built on binary fields.
StarkWare co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson said in a post on X that he supports Ethereum’s move toward STARKs, described in the post as hash-based SNARKs, but believes the wording around that shift omitted two points and included one misleading claim.
Ben-Sasson said, first, that the STARKs-versus-SNARKs debate has been underway for years, and that much of the relevant research was previously led by StarkWare and funded by the Ethereum Foundation. Second, he said small binary fields had already been introduced into the zero-knowledge proof field in the 2018 ZK-STARK paper, rather than being first created by Binius and Flonk.
He also argued that prime-field STARKs do not need to use large primes. As an example, he pointed to Stwo, which uses the 31-bit prime field M31 and, according to his post, delivers high efficiency.
On the hardware side, Ben-Sasson said multiplication over binary fields is inefficient on GPUs, while multiplication over small prime fields such as M31 is more efficient. He said that gap could pose hard-to-overcome challenges for GPU schemes built on binary fields.
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