​StarkWare, one of the biggest players in the 'layer-2 Ethereum scaling solutions' game, just made a huge announcement.

Before we get into it, who's StarkWare and what do they do?

StarkWare uses the 'ZkEVM Rollups' technology, to make transactions on Ethereum way faster, and way cheaper.

We wrote about ZkEVM Rollups in depth last week - but put simply, instead of verifying each Ethereum transaction separately, they group thousands of them together, and process the entire bundle faster, and cheaper.

Cool, so what's the big news?

Yesterday, it was announced that they'd be making their technology open source.

That's right, they'll soon let any developer read their source code, change it around, and use it for themselves without any royalty issues.

It's kind of like the equivalent of the smartest person in the class writing a great essay, then sharing that essay with everyone else in the class to modify it, and submit it as their own, without being called out for cheating.

Why's this so important?

It's clear that Ethereum scaling solutions are important for mainstream adoption of Ethereum - and on a broader scale, blockchain.

(Who wants to spend anything more than a fraction of a cent on transaction fees?).

Now, by StarkWare making their code completely open source, chances are, some big brains are going to take that, improve it in ways StarkWare hasn't done themselves, and distribute it even more widely.

StarkWare president and co-founder, Eli Ben-Sasson, said it best during the announcement when he said:

"[This] will put STARK technology in its rightful place, as a public good which will be used to benefit everyone."

More access = more adoption = a bigger, stronger, Web3 industry as a whole.

StarkWare, we salute you!