Endgame for Starknet
AMA with StarkWare & Starknet Foundation. Plus, ecosystem overview with protocol airdrops to farm.
You’ve probably heard about Starknet, perhaps used a few dApps. And if you spend many hours per day on X, you’ll even know Starknet uses “zk-STARKs” tech.
But what really makes Starknet unique and different from other L2s? What’s next to get excited about, and what’s the ultimate endgame vision for Starknet?
For this post I interviewed Louis Guthmann (Head of Product/Market Strategy at StarkWare) and Henri Lietaud (Head of Developer Relations at Starknet Foudation).
But first, I will review Starknet ecosystem and share protocols I farm for airdrops and high APYs!
Starknet at a Glance
There’s another reason you might’ve heard about Starknet: airdrop.
In February Starknet distributed ~700M STRK to nearly 1.3M addresses.
In total, 1.8B STRK are dedicated to the community with a DeFi Spring campaign distributing 40M STRK tokens currently underway.
As a result, Starknet is now 20th chain with $328M in TVL (Defillama data).
As you can see, TVL started to grow fast after the airdrop and continues to grow thanks to the DeFi spring incentives.
There are 15 protocols in total with STRK incentives with a full list here.
Personally, I continue to farm on Starknet thanks to:
High APYs for major tokens
Starknet dApps are running point systems with protocol tokens launching (hopefully) soon
Second airdrop is coming.
Here are a few dApps I currently farm:
Avnu: Dex aggregator. Points already live. Use my referral to start.
Tip: boost points by frequent but small transactions vs big but occasional transactions. Details here.
Nostra: No. 1 dApp on Starknet. Lending and AMM protocol with points system live. Plus, APYs for lending major assets reach 30%. Use my link here to get an additional 5% lifetime bonus.
Ekubo: No 1 AMM on Starknet. You earn more points based on how much fees your LP position generates! Plus, APYs for major pairs reach 57%.
Tip: Ekubo LP withdrawal fees are proportional to swap fee so careful managing your positions!
MySwap: Second largest AMM by TVL. You earn more points based on fees generated.
Most pools earn higher APY in STRK rewards than on Ekubo
→ Track all your positions on Argent portfolio. Makes the life easier.
So, what’s next for Starknet? How will it compete against other L2s to attract users and developers, what other dApps should you pay attention to? And what’s the final endgame vision for Starknet?
Below are the answers from StarkWare and Starknet Foundation representatives.
❓Purpose of Starknet L2
What is the purpose of Starknet when there are numerous Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum, and even Layer 1 solutions like Solana that offer lower transaction fees than any available Layer 2?
And what sets Starknet apart and makes it appealing to both USERS and DEVELOPERS?
🗣️Louis Guthmann (Head of Product/Market Strategy at StarkWare)
Starknet is the First general purpose ZkRollup to ever hit production.
Starknet has been started and worked on by StarkWare, the company who made the blockchain backend of dYdX (v3, aka the version you all know about), Sorare, Immutable, Apex, Brine and many others.
As for its differentiations with the competition, Starknet uses a different VM and technology than all other rollups. We have our own language Cairo, which is optimized for performance and what we call Provability as opposed to Solidity and the EVM.
In some sense, we are the closest rollup to compete with Solana in the approach and the go-to-market.
Overall, we do away with the EVM and its shortcomings and rebuilt everything from scratch to get the max performance without tradeoffs.
Starknet stands out mostly because of its dev community. All other rollups are competing for projects that build on all of them at once, Starknet attracts devs who are interested in its unique capabilities.
On Starknet, a developer can benefit from
Cheap computation
Ability to have a lot of data in the transaction (think being able to do a lot of Inscriptions)
Smart Accounts (aka Native Account Abstraction and the ability to batch many things in a single tx, think Approve + Swap + Revoke in a single tx)
High Throughput
L3s for cheap
As a consequence, we attracted projects that were interested in
Improving UX (AVNU, Ekubo, Fibrous, Argent, Braavos)
Doing some very advanced operations (think running full game logic on the blockchain such as DopeWars, Loot Survivor and what all the Dojo people are doing: here a few examples:
Finally, people focus on advanced cryptography to push the boundaries of what can be done
Trustless Oracle with Herodotus
ZK ML with GizaTech
Writing a full zkEVM on Starknet with Kakarot
TLDR: Our tech stack attracted developers who want to push what one can do and use Proofs everywhere. Users are benefiting from all those improvements.
❓Why use STRK as a gas token?
Starknet Alpha v0.13.0 upgrade reduces fees and enables the use of STRK tokens for fees. This decision has raised questions within the Ethereum community regarding Starknet's alliance with Ethereum.
So, I'm curious about the reasoning behind using STRK for fees instead of ETH.
🗣️Louis Guthmann (Head of Product/Market Strategy at StarkWare)
As explained previously, Starknet has its own environment for pretty much all aspects of the chain and for such, the network needs full sovereignty over its environment.
Paying in STRK means the network has better control over the monetary policy and can easily adjust at any chance in market conditions.
The sequencer continues to pay ETH for L1 security.
❓STARKs vs SNARKs: What’s the difference?
Going a bit more technical here.
Starknet is unique for using STARKs, as opposed to SNARK zero-knowledge technology that powers other Layer 2s. I think most people don't really know the difference between the two (or maybe we shouldn't?), but could you explain simply what differentiates the two and explain why you choose the STARK approach?
🗣️Louis Guthmann (Head of Product/Market Strategy at StarkWare)
In simple terms, STARKs, the technology we invented, is now the standard the industry uses, with the exception of Aztec. The distinction does not really matter anymore.
But for the purist, STARKs are a technique using very lightweight assumptions while SNARKs rely on less battle-tested techniques. Additionally, SNARKs use very cool math properties, but those properties make them less efficient to compute.
The core advantage of SNARKs is that they are very light in terms of size and that makes them very competitive on Ethereum. We prefer not to use them at all, as it gives more flexibility to the cryptography.
❓On STRK airdrop.
You dropped the STRK token. There were quite a few people unhappy with the distribution. Can you share your insights or lessons on what led to this type of distribution?
Also, the token distribution is not over yet. You mentioned in your blog post that you have "Future plans for STRK distribution to the community, including rebates and initiatives from various special community committees dedicated to DeFi, gaming, and more." Could you share some alpha on how it will work?
🗣️Henri Lietaud (Head of Developer Relations at Starknet Foudation)
Defining any distribution criteria is hard, because any line has people on both sides of it, but SNF has said that this was just the first step, so we'll keep posted on what's ahead.
We consulted with the community on this, and we'll keep doing that as SNF works to determine any future programs.
Stay tuned for sure!
❓What’s next for Starknet?
What's next for Starknet and the ecosystem to be excited about? Could you share the dApps that are coming to Starknet?
🗣️Louis Guthmann (Head of Product/Market Strategy at StarkWare)
I believe our biggest achievement was to create an organic community of devs and hard-core believers that will push us and improve the system.
Our next target is converting this thriving developer ecosystem into a success platform for businesses and applications to thrive. Get people to know that UX and projects on Starknet are worth their time and investigation and that there is indeed a lot to do there
This is what we are working on and what I want people to understand. Proofs are the silver bullet of chains.
So, the best analogy I can give is that Starknet aims to get the best UX, the lowest fees (even zero fees in some instances), low latency, and the maximum scale without sacrificing security.
If/when we are successful, we will see a new internet where all websites will be running using Provable Servers which can natively manage money and will prove themselves to Starknet and Ethereum.
In the world of tomorrow, we won’t ask why using a blockchain but not using a Server that can manage money without any custody. And this is what Proofs and Starknet are optimizing for.
And I am gonna bet that the first instance of this Provable Server will be Fully Onchain Gaming via Dojo and Cartridge.
When it comes to the dApps, I cannot share my personal opinion as I love them all but I am very excited by projects such as Ekubo, Nostra in the AMM realm, AVNU/Fibrous in the DEX aggregation, zkLend on the lending front, Cartridge/Realms/Focus Tree when it comes to gaming and casual app as well as moonshot such GizaTech in the AI front and Herodotus/Pragma in the oracle realm.
Note: ecosystem screenshot added by me, Ignas, for visual representation.
❓Endgame plan:
What’s the endgame plan & vision for Starknet?
🗣️Louis Guthmann (Head of Product/Market Strategy at StarkWare)
Starknet aims at being the base layer of the Integrity Web.
As other perfectly put it, Proofs are the silver bullet of blockchain and soon, the protocol choices we made, Parallelisation, Smart Accounts, Verifier available on mainnet, and an optimized VM and languages are coming in place for all to see.
To achieve this, we want to bring Horizontal Scaling done right at the base layer. L3s will exist but they will blend in the base layer in a transparent way for the user such that they won’t really know they are working on a different execution environment.
Many new technologies are coming our way and will ultimately benefit massively the users. We can see it with the Stwo announcement already.
The engame is a world where the whole website can be proven and trustlessly connected to the blockchain ecosystem. We believe we need all the breakthroughs Starknet provides to reach it and allow everyone to Own their Digital Lives.