Despite owning the prover, you will still be reliant within starknet? Reliant on Starknet's SHARP? AM I WRONG? What doe Starknet's SHARP controls?
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Executive summary
Owning a prover implementation does not by itself free you from reliance on Starknet’s shared proving infrastructure (SHARP): Starknet currently uses SHARP to aggregate and submit proofs on-chain and plans to run the S-two prover inside SHARP to lower costs and increase throughput [1] [2]. L2Beat and Starknet docs show the SHARP verifier is a critical on-chain gate for state updates and that control of the shared verifier can be changed via multisig governance roles — a vector of external control that affects any rollup using SHARP [3] [4].
1. Why your statement “owning the prover” is incomplete: SHARP is the aggregator that matters
Starknet’s architecture separates the prover engine from the shared proving service: SHARP is a proof aggregator that consumes many Cairo program proofs and produces a single recursive STARK proof to submit on-chain, amortizing verification costs across users [4] [5]. Even if an actor runs their own prover implementation, Starknet’s public rollup historically relies on SHARP to combine proofs and submit the unified verification to Ethereum, so running a local prover does not automatically eliminate dependence on the shared aggregation and submission pipeline [4] [1].
2. What SHARP actually controls — the on‑chain, gating verifier and cost model
SHARP aggregates proofs and produces the single proof that Starknet’s on‑chain verifier consumes; state updates on L1 must be “proven via the SHARP verifier” according to monitoring and docs, meaning that SHARP’s submitted proofs are the authoritative cryptographic link between L2 state and L1 security [3] [1]. SHARP’s design — recursive proofs and batching — directly controls how many blocks get rolled up per on‑chain proof and therefore drives the network’s fee amortization and throughput characteristics [4] [5].
3. Governance and control: multisigs, security councils and the shared verifier risk
Independent research (L2Beat) documents that the shared SHARP verifier can be changed by a 2/4 Starkware multisig with an eight‑day delay; that same report notes governance around the rollup contract and bridges is split across a Security Council and various multisigs, meaning changes to SHARP or its verifier would affect all rollups using it [3]. That creates an unavoidable operational dependence: even if you own a prover codebase, the on‑chain verifier and the governance actors controlling it are a chokepoint described in public reporting [3].
4. Roadmap changes reduce dependence but do not eliminate a shared role yet
Starknet’s roadmap and blog posts show active decentralization and open‑sourcing of components: S-two (Stwo) is being integrated into SHARP and is open‑source, and Starknet plans to open more of the prover/sequencer stack [6] [7] [8]. Those steps reduce vendor lock‑in and make it easier for third parties to run compatible provers, but the narrative in Starknet’s own documentation still treats SHARP as the production aggregator used by Starknet to “reduce costs and improve efficiency” — a shared service, not an opt‑out mode [1] [4].
5. Alternative paths and what sources do not say
Sources show Starknet’s tech stack is being made available (SN Stack components, multiple sequencer implementations), and S-two is open-source so third parties can run provers; however, available sources do not mention a fully deployed, permissionless alternative where every rollup operator independently proves and submits state without any SHARP‑style shared verifier being used by Starknet mainnet [9] [8]. In short: open code exists, but operational reliance on the shared proving submission remains in current reporting [1] [4].
6. Practical implications for builders and validators
For builders trying to avoid dependence on Starkware’s shared services, the key levers are (a) running your own prover compatible with the public verifier, (b) participating in governance that controls the shared verifier, and (c) following Starknet’s decentralization roadmap (validator voting, staking stages) that aims to shift trust and operational power onto the community [7] [8]. L2Beat highlights that changing the SHARP verifier is a governance action with delay mechanics, so governance membership and multisig design materially affect how independent an operator can be [3].
7. Bottom line and what to watch next
You are not wrong to be wary: owning a prover implementation does not by itself remove reliance on SHARP because the on‑chain verification and batching model currently routes state security through the shared prover and verifier [4] [1]. Watch for two indicators that would materially change this dependence: Starknet adopting a model where rollups can submit their own independent verifiers on L1 without relying on the shared verifier (not found in current reporting), and continued decentralization steps (staking/consensus decentralization, governance changes) that transfer control of SHARP’s on‑chain verifier to broadly distributed actors [7] [10].
Limitations: this analysis uses only the provided sources and therefore cannot confirm runtime operational details or recent off‑chain deployments beyond those documents (see citations).