Kakarot Lianchuang personally described the original intention, advantages and positioning of the project

Yesterday, Kakarot, a modular zkEVM based on CairoVM, completed the Pre-Seed round of financing, with participation from Vitalik Buterin and StarkWare. This article was first published during StarkWare Sessions 2023, the top StarkWare ecological event in February this year. Foresight News and Kernel Ventures interviewed Kakarot Joint Innovation and technical directors about the original intention, advantages and financing plans of KakarotzkEVM.

Compiled & Organized by: Karen, Foresight News

Interview: Rose, Kernel Ventures

This article was first published on February 9, 2023. The original title is "Exclusive Discussion | Dialogue with Kakarot Lianchuang: The latest version of Kakarot zkEVM may be a smart contract or an application chain"

On February 5-6, StarkWare hosted StarkWare Sessions 2023, a two-day event in Tel Aviv, Israel. At the event, StarkWare official team members, Ethereum Foundation researchers, and community project team members focused on StarkNet governance and decentralization progress, StarkNet DeFi, account abstraction, Layer3, EIP-4844 and sharding, AppChain, zkEVM and other hot topics , through speeches, panel discussions, and demonstrations, explored the development status, construction methods, and potential of multiple hot topics and tracks in Ethereum and StarkWare.

Foresight News visited the top StarkWare ecological event and asked the core developers some issues that everyone is concerned about. We interviewed Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder and president of StarkWare, Louis Guthmann, head of ecosystem at StarkWare, Abdelhamid Bakhta, head of exploration at StarkWare, Elias Tazartes, co-founder of Kakarot, and Clément Walter, technical lead of Kakarot, and Dankrad Feist, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation.

In this interview with Kakarot co-founder Elias Tazartes and Kakarot technical director Clément Walter, we can learn about the original intention, advantages and financing plans of KakarotzkEVM.

Foresight News: From a technical point of view, what is the main difference between KakarotzkEVM and other zkEVMs? Can you introduce the advantages of KakarotzkEVM?

Elias Tazartes and Clément Walter: Most zkEVM leadership teams, technical leaders must be cryptographers like electrical engineers, because they design ZK circuits to build VMs. As engineers, we've been using the high-level language Cairo. Cairo is a provable language, so anything executed on Cairo is provable, that's the difference in the way.

Other zkEVMs have to build circuits, they have to build low-level circuits to execute EVM code. We build an interpreter (Interpreter) in Cairo, and the output of the interpreter is provable. So the output is the same, the way the provable EVM is executed and built is different. They take more of an electrical engineering approach whereas we use a software engineering approach.

Foresight News: What was the original intention of creating Kakarot zkEVM? What is the positioning of Kakarot zkEVM in the StarkWare ecosystem?

Elias Tazartes and Clément Walter: We initially just wanted to try it out because it seemed possible. The topic of zkEVM has been going on for a long time. I think from StarkWare's point of view, they won't choose to do that, and in a way, they will continue to do technology. So we started experimenting, and now Kakarot zkEVM is developing very fast, the question is where will it lead us, and how to use it.

In the StarkWare community ecosystem, I see Kakarot as a community-driven project, research-based, research-valued, open to anyone to contribute, and bottom-up governance.

Foresight News: What will the final version of the Kakarot zkEVM look like? What value empowerment or optimization will this bring to the StarkWare ecosystem? What are the new features of Kakarot zkEVM?

Elias Tazartes and Clément Walter: The latest version is not very clear yet, it may be a smart contract, or the entire application chain.

As for what it might bring, I think Clément is starting to have an idea. So basically, depending on where we end up putting Kakarot, there may or may not be. But as of now, Kakarot is a smart contract on StarkNet.

So we can call any other contract deployed on StarkNet from within the zkEVM, which means we allow people to deploy a Solidity contract on StarkNet as if it were deployed elsewhere, but still be able to use all the ecosystem. Our interpretation of it might be interoperability.

**Foresight News: Will Kakarot zkEVM have a financing plan in the future? **

Elias Tazartes and Clément Walter: Yes, probably at the end of the quarter, maybe in the second quarter.