Starknet is preparing to roll out one of its most significant upgrades yet, with version 0.14.0 scheduled for mainnet activation on Sep. 1.
Summary
- Starknet v0.14.0 will activate on Sept. 1, bringing decentralized sequencing, pre-confirmations, and a new fee market.
- The upgrade introduces faster transaction confirmation times, updated mempool design, and RPC 0.9.0 with improved statuses.
- Recent developments include the launch of Extended DEX, Bitcoin staking proposals, and a July transition to STRK as the gas token.
The update, approved by community vote and confirmed in an Aug. 18 post on X, brings decentralized sequencing, faster confirmations, and a new fee market to the Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 network.
Decentralized sequencing and pre-confirmations
At the core of v0.14.0 is the move toward decentralized sequencing. Using Tendermint consensus, the network will alternate between multiple independent sequencers instead of relying solely on one. This change improves censorship resistance, ensures fair transaction ordering, and boosts fault tolerance.
To improve user experience with sub-second latency, the upgrade also adds a new transaction status called “pre-confirmations.” This system offers smoother performance even under high network traffic, with the majority of transactions achieving near-final confirmation in less than a second.
Block times will remain between 4 to 6 seconds, but pre-confirmations allow users to see results much more quickly, making this upgrade a major step in lowering wait times for routine transactions.
Fee market and technical enhancements
Starknet (STRK) v0.14.0 employs a fee structure based on Ethereum’s EIP-1559, with a minimum base price for layer-2 gas set in FRI. This change reduces costs and increases predictability by cutting the connection between Ethereum gas prices and Starknet fees.
Along with adding new transaction statuses to RPC 0.9.0 and updating the mempool architecture, the release also makes multi-block processing possible to increase proving efficiency. The roadmap shows that future updates will progressively decentralize sequencer operations, even though StarkWare will still be in charge of them in this version.
To ensure a seamless migration, there will be a brief outage of roughly 15 minutes during the switch to v0.14.0, during which time transactions will be temporarily paused.
Recent Starknet ecosystem developments
The upcoming upgrade follows a series of ecosystem milestones. Extended, a perpetual trading decentralized exchange with over 50 trading pairs and leverage of up to 100x, debuted on the Starknet mainnet on Aug. 12. . Earlier this month, the community voted on SNIP-31, a proposal introducing Bitcoin (BTC) staking through tokenized assets such as WBTC and tBTC.
In its July recap, Starknet announced improvements to its mempool, the launch of the fee market, faster block times, and a shift to sole support for V3 transactions using STRK as the gas token.
All of these advancements point to Starknet’s drive for decentralization, scalability, and wider Ethereum rollup ecosystem adoption.
