Starknet monthly recap #18: January
All you need to know about Starknet in January
Welcome to the 18th edition of my monthly recap, where I bring you the most important updates and developments from the Starknet ecosystem!
📣 Important news of the month
🔷 Starknet Roadmap for Q1 - Q2 2025
Before diving into this roadmap, let’s take a step back and review how the Starknet ecosystem has evolved in 2024: here’s a complete recap of the optimizations, new projects, use cases, partnerships, and more that were shipped during 2024.
Now that you have a clear view of the past, let’s look ahead at what the future holds. Over the next few months, StarkWare’s engineering team will focus on further reducing fees for users while significantly enhancing UX and DevX through the following optimizations:
Cairo-Native will massively boost Starknet’s Sequencer performance, leading to much faster transactions and lower fees in the long run as execution becomes more efficient.
L2 Gas introduces a new gas model that accurately reflects all execution-related costs, making transaction fee calculations more precise for users.
Stateful Compression will reduce fees by optimizing storage costs on Ethereum. Less data stored on Ethereum = cheaper transactions and better scalability.
Mempool + Fee Market will improve UX for degens, allowing them to pay higher fees for faster execution when needed.
Stwo, StarkWare’s next-gen prover, ~940x faster than the current one powering Starknet, will enable faster, cheaper, and more scalable ZK proofs, unlocking new use cases like client-side proving.
Staking Phase 2 will introduce an active role for validators, evaluating their liveness metrics before they take on a formal role in consensus (EOY).
Faster, cheaper, stronger, decentralized, and better experience for both users and developers.
By the way, if you're a developer on Starknet, take note: Starknet v0.13.4 will introduce some breaking changes that could impact your projects.
The sooner you're aware and prepared, the better. Make the necessary adjustments as soon as possible—ideally before the release.
Testnet deployment: ~ February 17-24
Mainnet deployment: ~ January 10-24
🔷 Starknet’s plan to become the first fully decentralized and secure L2
Phase 1 of staking has been launched in late November 2024, with the primary goal of deploying and testing the STRK staking contract. As the first permissionless staking contract on an L2, StarkWare needed to gather feedback from the community and ensure stability. Now that these objectives have been met, and with the phase 1 being a massive success (as shown in the numbers below), it's time to move forward.
The ultimate goal of staking is to transition Starknet’s operations under validators control over the long run. Here’s the roadmap to make that happen:
As such, the STRK phase 2 is coming in Q2 2025, introducing validator block attestation, giving STRK validators an active role in staking.
Phase 3 is expected by the end of 2025, with Phase 4 rolling out in early 2026. At that point, Starknet will be fully decentralized.
If you want to participate in Starknet staking right now, here’s a complete map of the ecosystem supporting STRK staking—including wallets, LSTs, Starknet projects running validators, and more.
In term of decentralization and security, it's worth noting that Starknet:
will be recognized as a Stage 1 Rollup by L2Beat in the coming weeks
is powered by a quantum-resistant proving system
🔷 Everyone can now build their own Starknet
Starknet has become one of the most high-performance stacks on the market, and now anyone can use it to build their own Starknet, tailored to their business needs.
By choosing the SN stack, projects benefit from:
The most battle-tested ZK stack, with proven success stories (Sorare, dYdX, ImmutableX, Paradex, and more).
The most resource-efficient Rollup stack available.
One of the fastest scaling solutions, with 800+ TPS capacity.
A Web2-like user experience, thanks to Starknet’s Native Account Abstraction.
A constantly evolving stack, allowing builders to passively benefit from ongoing innovations and optimizations—including upcoming features like Cairo-Native, Stateful Compression, Stwo, and more.
To make appchain creation even easier, Starknet has partnered with Alt_Layer, the leading RaaS provider, to simplify the process of building Starknet-based appchains.
Currently, builders can leverage this stack to launch a Starknet appchain as an L2 (like Paradex), and very very soon, they will also be able to build Starknet appchains as L3s, unlocking greater flexibility and even lower gas fees.
🔷 Bitcoin is now a top priority at StarkWare
The goal of this initiative is to make Starknet the first L2 to settle on both Ethereum and Bitcoin, unlocking huge benefits for both communities. To learn more, click here.
Two key updates in this direction:
Dan Held, a serial Bitcoin entrepreneur and OG educator, has joined StarkWare as an advisor to accelerate all Bitcoin-related initiatives.
StarkWare has formed a new Bitcoin-focused exploration team, which is currently hiring.
Overall, if you want to learn more about all the key priorities for the Starknet ecosystem in 2025, read this quick article.
📣 Important news of the month
🔷 Ekubo shipping killer features & expanding to EVM chains
In January, Ekubo shipped a game-changing feature for Starknet traders:
Limit orders, allowing traders to buy/sell at a precise price, avoid slippage, and automate entries/exits.
These pools are already been integrated into Fibrous, a DEX aggregator.
Additionally, Ekubo just open-sourced a new initiative: Privacy Pools on Starknet—a Tornado Cash-like feature with regulatory compliance. So every devs can now contribute to it.
Ekubo is also expanding beyond Starknet, launching the alpha version of its protocol on Ethereum L1. This marks the beginning of its expansion to EVM chains, which is bullish for Starknet because:
Ekubo’s governance remains on Starknet, attracting more stakeholders to the ecosystem.
If this expansion succeeds, it will bring more attention to Starknet dApps and the broader ecosystem.
🔷 Starknet now has its own dedicated Kaito dashboard
Kaito has officially integrated Starknet, meaning that by creating content about Starknet, you can now:
Farm Kaito points (Yap) and climb the Starknet mindshare leaderboard
Have a chance to be selected for the Wolf Pack League program and get rewarded for your content
Become one of the future legends making content about Starknet before its mass adoption
All in one anon.
🔷 AI Acceleration on Starknet
AI is currently the most dominant sector in terms of mindshare, and it is one of the most rapidly growing areas on Starknet. Here are some of the latest developments from the ecosystem:
The biggest Eliza-focused hackathon is currently running on Starknet, offering mentorship and a $250K prize pool. The hackathon ends on February 14th, so we can expect to see its results on Starknet Mainnet in the coming weeks.
Kasar Labs has launched Starknet Agent Kit, enabling builders to use AI agents to autonomously execute tasks on Starknet and allowing users to interact onchain simply by prompting what they want.
Daydream, a multi-chain AI agent framework built by the Realms team, has officially launched. It aims to create a versatile framework for AI agents to operate fully onchain.
zKopr has already built an AI agent leveraging Daydream, which can play zIdle autonomously.
🔷 Participating in STRK staking has never been easier
You can now liquid stake your STRK directly from your Argent wallet interface.
You can also bypass the unstaking process for xSTRK by swapping xSTRK to STRK directly on Endur, thanks to the AVNU backend integration.
Speaking of xSTRK, here’s the ultimate dashboard to track all onchain activity and evolution of this STRK liquid staking token.
🔷 MetaMask Adoption on Starknet
You can now use MetaMask (Snap), the leading EVM wallet, on most Starknet DeFi dApps, including AVNU, Nostra, zkLend, Fibrous, Opus, Ekubo, and Layer Akira.
🔷 Easily create your own Starknet dashboard
With Token Terminal, one of the leading crypto data providers, you can now easily create a custom Starknet dashboard to monitor all the key metrics you need.
🔷 A new tool for seamless user onboarding on Starknet
Akira, co-founder of Endur and STRKfarm, has developed a new tool to facilitate user onboarding on Starknet. This tool allows users to execute activities on Starknet directly from Ethereum (with support for more chains coming soon). Being open-source, any builder can integrate it.
🔹 Alpha Zone 💅
This month, 6 projects have launched on Starknet Mainnet:
Zohal, a GMX v2 like Perp DEX
Dragark, a fully onchain game
Dark Shuffle, a fully onchain card game
Vikare Battle, the Everai TG game
Grid Lock, another fully onchain game
The Marquis, an onchain mobile game hub
And 4 on Starknet Testnet:
Starksight, a no-loss prediction market
Remus DEX, a CLOB DEX
Call the banners, a fully onchain game
Realm Of Ra, the first fully onchain Mancala game
I have also spotted three new projects building on Starknet:
Turbopump, a memecoin launchpad
The Future DeFi, a DeFi hub
Ponziland, a fully onchain game
📰 Some of the Best Content of the Month
🔷 Starknet’s incredible evolution in 2024
Here’s an article covering the entire evolution of Starknet and its ecosystem throughout 2024.
🔷 What’s coming in 2025
This article breaks down Starknet’s plans to improve its ecosystem and drive adoption of its stack and applications.
🔷 The more, the cheaper on Starknet
This article explains why increased activity on Starknet leads to lower transaction costs in gas fees.
🔷 AI Podcast
AI is rapidly expanding on Starknet. In this new podcast, Marijke talks with LOAF (one of the main Eliza contributors) about why AI matters and what’s brewing on Starknet.
None of the content of this newsletter is financial advice. Always do your own research.
Thank you for reading, and see you in November for the next monthly recap ⏳
