Starknet’s Stwo prover cuts peak memory to 2.1 GiB, putting STARK proofs on phones

Generating a zero-knowledge proof has long been a job for serious hardware. Now a phone can do it. Open research on Stwo, the prover powering Starknet, has reduced its peak memory use from 13.9 GiB to 2.1 GiB. That reduction is what allows a smartphone to generate proofs for Starknet transactions. From workstation territory to your pocket A prover is software that produces a cryptographic proof. Think of the proof as a compact mathematical receipt showing that a batch of computation was done correctly. Anyone can check that receipt quickly without redoing the work. STARK proofs, the type Starknet relies on, are one way to build those receipts. Peak memory is the most RAM the prover needs at any single moment during that job. The research narrowed that doorway requirement dramatically. A job that once demanded 13.9 GiB at its worst moment now tops out at 2.1 GiB. Community contributors had already flagged memory peaks above 13 GiB in earlier builds, before the latest round of optimizations arrived. Separate benchmarks put Stwo’s typical memory footprint somewhere between roughly 10 GiB and 20+ GiB, scaling with the size of the workload. Against that backdrop, a 2.1 GiB peak for tran...