Starknet Ecosystem Strategy Pros and Cons

Written by: Maxlion Source: X, @Real_Maxlion

This article aims to systematically analyze the things that are done wrong and right in the Starknet ecological strategy, and also explain why the collapse of Starknet users and coin prices and the prosperity of the developer community coexisted in the past.

Because I used cells to record the matrix strategy in the original text, the Twitter article will be longer, so I recommend that you read the original article "Starknet Ecological Strategy Gains and Losses" on Feishu directly.

https://mpfxyvfyzr.feishu.cn/docx/Ss0Rdwdg1oseJgx2OIYc7Marncd

Why write

In the past, I had a simple belief that technology and labor could bring returns in the long run, but labor-intensive and technologically advanced does not mean that users and the market will recognize it. There are many other factors that determine the short-term and long-term success of a public chain. Especially in 24-25 years, Starknet's performance in terms of on-chain ecology, market voice, user scale and token price was not satisfactory or even surprising.

Starknet has never produced an application with user wealth effect, paradigm innovation and high user usage (full-chain games are still worth looking forward to), and the token price has fallen below the valuation and OTC 0.4u price (the latest price is 0.23u), and the weekly active address has fallen to 23k and the daily active address has fallen to 4k. These phenomena and data have shown that Starknet's operation has big problems. In addition, I personally participated in the growth of the Starknet Chinese developer community and project ecology from 23 to 24 years. I realized that the understanding and operation methods of the public chain should start from reality rather than live in ideals and be limited to the perspective of the developer community. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct some more comprehensive and detailed reflections on the public chain ecological strategy.

https://tokenterminal.com/explorer/projects/starknet?v=NDA2NmU3MTkyYTRiMWZjODg1NjkxODM5

Recording these thoughts is also because I still have a belief that gambling and PVP are not all of blockchain/encryption. We still need to think about the long-term operation and construction of public chains and how to organize different encryption classes/groups to work together for a goal out of their own self-interest and other-interest motives.

Back to the point, despite the above problems in the development of Starknet ecosystem, this does not mean that the development of Starknet has ended. The Starknet ecosystem is still continuing. The Starknet Foundation is still frequently organizing developer activities around the world, such as in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, providing ecosystem support to developers and teams and launching various ecosystem grants; the DOJO engine and full-chain games, Kakarot are still developing; Starknet's parent company StarkWare is still promoting the technical development of BTC ZK and trying to promote BTC miners to accept OP_CAT to achieve Bitcoin verifiable computing, so that Starknet can become the world's first de facto ETH and BTC dual Layer2. But these are all Starknet's future stories.

In this article, I will analyze why the success of StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation, as the operators of Starknet, in technical infrastructure and developer communities has not brought prosperity to on-chain applications, an increase in users and TVL, and what they did right and what they did wrong. However, this article is not a complete work, and I am still collecting a lot of information about Starknet and other new public chains for thinking.

Ideal Ecological Strategy

Before developing the analysis, I would like to explain my presuppositions, that is, a correct ecological strategy should have good performance in indicators such as token price, TVL, number of users, developers, and number of DApps, and these indicators will have an inherent flywheel growth logic because of the ecological strategy, such as:

Technical fundamentals, investment and financing, and early communities support the initial price of tokens, and the price of coins supports TVL, and users and developers follow.

With the construction of the developer community, the improvement of the tool chain and ecological support, the increase in developers will bring about an increase in the number of DApps, a variety of types, and innovations in technology and narratives, and the increase and increase of DApps and the corresponding wealth effect will bring new users and TVL, which will increase the demand for token buyers to drive up token prices, and then promote the prosperity of DeFi on the chain and the increase in users, which will attract an increase in developers. As shown in the figure below:

And each link is inseparable from the public chain operator - often the foundation's ecological support for developers and project teams (education, funding, incubation, market making, business matchmaking), and user-oriented marketing (education, subsidies, brand promotion). For example, from the growth of users and TVL to developers and DApps, the foundation needs to frequently organize developer activities and investment promotion activities when the public chain is hot. On the one hand, it organizes educational activities, hackathons, and HackerHouse for developers, and on the other hand, it actively invites existing medium and large project teams to launch ecological support plans such as multi-chain deployment Grant, so that the user market can be supplied with enough DApps and plates (clams), and the foundation also needs to hype one or two leading applications and tokens to help users focus their attention and detonate topics and help developers and teams set market examples.

Strategy Overview

Let's start analyzing Starknet. Regarding the object of analysis, StarkWare is the development team of the Starknet public chain and the provider of most technical solutions such as nodes, provers, etc., and occasionally organizes some developer activities, hereinafter referred to as SW. Starrknet Foundation is the main body that manages the development of the Starknet ecosystem, responsible for managing most $STRK tokens and ecological support activities, hereinafter referred to as SF.

Four types of strategies will be analyzed below, those that are done wrong, those that are done right and well, those that are done right but poorly, and controversial strategies. In particular, the third type, since I do not have solid information about the personnel of StarkWare and Starknet Foundation, I can only classify the parts that I think are done wrong or not done as those that I believe they did but did not do well, such as token market making and business development.

First, the things that are done wrong

1. Lack of user-oriented brand public relations. From SW and SN official accounts and executives to community Kols, there is an atmosphere of technology first and developer first, which of course has a repulsive effect on ordinary users. As mentioned in the BD section, Starknet particularly likes to post tweets about infrastructure cooperation. StarkWare’s content is mainly technology-oriented, and the Starknet Foundation is mainly developer content. The user-oriented accounts with good market voice are Nurstar and Starknet Digger

Other managers and eco kols are mainly tech content. I came to this conclusion by browsing a lot of Starknet list kol content and asking Grok. Developers are very important in the development of public chains, but Starknet is not developed for developers.

Ask Grok

An incident that particularly reflects the lack of user orientation is that StarkWare's then-Exploration lead Abdel said that Mao Zedong was an E-Begger, which was taken out of context to satirize users as electronic beggars. Some things are not worth two taels if they are not weighed, but they cannot be weighed even a thousand pounds if they are weighed. (I am not trying to whitewash or attack Abdel. I respect the work and spirit of builders like him.)

Strictly speaking, it is difficult for users and developers to not care about airdrop income at all. Most users and developers are profit-seeking parties to some extent. The public chain should not despise this but should use everyone's profit-seeking characteristics to guide everyone to continue to use and develop DApps instead of satirizing some users who interact only for profit - Abdel's original intention was to talk about profit-seeking parties rather than all users. In addition, none of the Starknet official account and the various StarkWare and Starknet Foundation managers are traffic-type accounts. They often post some technical and developer community content that is difficult to attract users' attention. On the other hand, the existing applications in the Starknet ecosystem also find it difficult to support accounts to publish content praising the development of applications or promoting applications to users (sending DOJO LootRealms Influence Cartridge back and forth, but their experience is not good at present, but Starknet really has nothing to tweet about). Starknet has not released new, fun, valuable and priced applications on the main network for a long time, which is also a problem of ecological support work.

2. Follow market traffic. Starknet's Twitter matrix rarely follows the industry and global hot spots to publish content and fomo projects, such as account abstraction in 2023, inscriptions in 2024, and memecoin from the end of 2024 to the beginning of 2025. There were some investments and technical follow-ups in Bitcoin in 24 years, but the traffic was not imported into Starknet. For example, the Bitcoin sidechain Chakra and ZK solution QED invested by SW at that time had nothing to do with the Starknet mainnet.

On the contrary, I recommended two BTC to Starknet cross-chain-interoperability projects to SW and SF, but only received the routine Seed Grant and no additional support such as media and technology, which made me angry. What a good topic to get traffic. Starknet once had several inscriptions that were also left unfinished. However, from the perspective of developers first, Starknet rarely follows the market traffic, which can be regarded as unity of knowledge and action. Ethereum developers are the first because Ethereum can create concepts to lead innovation, traffic and investment. Starknet's media and ecological support teams cannot fully learn EF because they cannot create concepts and guide the market.

3. The on-chain wallet does not support USDT withdrawals. From the main network in 24 to the beginning of 25, it has not been solved. This is not an OP_CAT-level technical/consensus problem.

The right things include:

1. Early application team funding and developer airdrops. From 2021 to the end of 2023, StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation provided funding in the form of airdrops and targeted grants to teams and developers who deployed projects on the Starknet testnet and mainnet, such as two rounds of Early Adopter Grants (EAG) and the Provison airdrop issued in early 2024 - submitting code in related libraries - participating in the contribution certification as a Starknet developer can get at least 10k$STRK. On the other hand, aside from some analysis of insider trading, the airdrops to users were also generous, maintaining a considerable level of public chain popularity, but the subsequent ecological support and incubation did not keep up and wasted this popularity.

https://community.starknet.io/t/announcing-round-1-of-early-adopter-grants-eag/54269

The effect is to stabilize the Starknet developer community. This is actually something that is easy to find that needs to be done. The development cycle from the test network in 21 years to the main network update in 24 years is too long. Teams and developers are constantly leaving the Starknet ecosystem. If you don’t pay, more people will leave. The following figure is the developer data

https://app.artemis.xyz/developer-activity?ecosystemValue=Starknet

2. Ecosystem funding. The funding and airdrops mentioned above are broad-based, while ecological funding is relatively targeted at projects in various tracks, such as DeFi Spring, which provides $STRK subsidies to DeFi projects and users, Propulsion Pilot Program for game teams, Growth Grant for multi-chain and late-stage teams, and Seed Grant for early teams and individual developers. It is good that the form is complete and there is no loss of existing applications.

3. Community project collaboration. In addition to continuous airdrops and various grants, SE and SF have organized many project collaborations led by Starknet community developers. StarkWare's Exploration team has organized and guided the developer community to do many projects to form a project library list -KeepStarknetStrange. In addition, Starknet and Cairo language documents and most tool chains are built by the community, which has formed a large developer group centered on open source project collaboration for Starknet.

By the way, Onlydust is the most important funding platform for Starknet project collaboration. A large amount of funds from the Starknet ecosystem are provided to open source projects through this platform.

The Logo was used incorrectly as the old version of Starknet Logo, and an error has been reported

4. Community localization construction. There are a large number of local developer communities led by local developers under the support of the Foundation in Africa, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia. These communities are often non-profit organizations, with daily work led by locals, receiving funding and other support from SF and SW, and holding various Starknet developer activities, which constitute the global social layer of Starknet. This PPT is a brief introduction I made for the Starknet community. Please go to the Feishu link to view it.

5. Technical infrastructure. Through investment, publicity, technical cooperation and other means, it has supported the infrastructure development of Kakarot, application chain, sequencer, account abstraction, BTC ZK, and full-chain games, theoretically laying the foundation for application innovation

However, most of the infrastructure tracks have not produced any eye-catching user-end projects, and most of them are just infrastructure investments, such as Kakarot and Lootrealms. Technical infrastructure. Through investment, publicity, technical cooperation and other means, we have supported the infrastructure development of Kakarot, application chain, sorter, account abstraction, BTC ZK, and full-chain games, theoretically laying the foundation for application innovation. However, most infrastructure tracks have not produced any outstanding projects. Most of them only receive investment in infrastructure, such as Kakarot and DOJO (except Lootrealms. Can only one app be produced for one infrastructure?). These technical infrastructures are conducive to application innovation in the long run, but they do not necessarily mean that there will be application innovation. The missing logic in the middle is to guide developers and teams to build apps. In reality, the conversion rate of developer output is not high (data from hackathon projects should be collected and compared with developer data

The previous part talked about things that were done right and well, and things that were done wrong. Now I will start to introduce those things that were done right but not well (I just didn’t have a solid hammer on whether SW and SF did it seriously, so I classified it as an ecological strategy that was done but not well) and controversial points.

1. Token market making. $STRK has fallen from $1.8-$2.6-$0.2. For users, they are not only users of DApps on the chain, but also holders of $STRK tokens. If the token price continues to fall, it means that every user of the Starknet network must be prepared for the risk of loss.

Coin price and user double kill. Dialectically speaking, the fall has left room for longer-term development, but what application development does Starknet rely on to link the coin price?

On the other hand, the entire DeFi on Starknet and the profits of projects with token economy will also suffer losses due to the decline in token prices, and Starknet Spring's DeFi subsidies cannot compensate for this part of the loss. Therefore, the collapse of token prices will drive user churn. In addition, user churn will also aggravate the price collapse. On the one hand, it is due to the accelerated decline caused by the lack of liquidity, and on the other hand, it is due to the pledge liquidation caused by the price plunge. For example, I personally had tens of thousands of tokens liquidated at 0.4 because I thought that at the end of the year, an investor purchased the Starknet Foundation at a price of 0.4U through OTC in Hong Kong. $STRK, so I thought 0.4 was a safe price, but it has been 0.2 so far.

2. Memecoin ecosystem support. There is a token launch platform UnRuggableMemecoin, but the system lacks liquidity support (market making and trading), Fomo's community culture, publicity and trading market. I introduced several developers and teams working on Memecoin and plates to SW and SF. Earlier, they implicitly said that they did not support this type of project. Later, they generally supported it. You need to promote and retweet the project. After the project is completed, you can let the relevant accounts retweet it, but there is no special support.

The Starknet bro who once supported Memecoin, I am so disappointed

The founder’s support is also an important factor. The early founders were too embarrassed to stand up, and when they were willing to stand up, users were no longer willing to pay (it is really difficult for the founder to be a ZK expert, but you are the founder and you must lead everyone to rush). Starknet founder Eli rejected Meme in the early 23-24 years and later danced on Twitter to support Memecoin. I think it is too late. The 2024 Starknet window period is so short. If you can’t rush up with the popularity of the airdrop, you have to wait for the next cycle.

3. Business cooperation. I am a marketing major. Most of Starknet’s cooperation is limited to technical cooperation and media publicity without subsequent ecological drainage. There are no new users, limited activation of existing users, and no increase in TVL, which is invalid exposure. Let’s see if the correlation between Twitter’s official announcement of cooperation and on-chain data can prove/refute this point.

Cooperation with Polygon Avail

This is also related to the partners chosen by Starknet BD. Most of the partners are projects with strong infrastructure or technical style. In layman's terms, these are projects that users don’t understand well or cannot directly participate in. I have mentioned in the previous Grok section that SW WF should look for more task platforms, Poap, social, games, and Memecoin to cooperate with. If you have difficulty making choices, go to Rootdata.

4. Project conversion. By taking stock of the conversion rate from developer activities (such as Hacker House) to commercial projects, we can calculate the return on investment of the developer community that SF has spent a lot of money on. If it is too low, it means that the person in charge of the developer community is doing useless work in a circle of their own, which needs to be studied.

One ​​controversial point is the ecological management of mainland China.

Ecological management of mainland China. Some Chinese people are doing developer activities in mainland China, one-on-one and one-to-many evangelism of project teams, ecological consultation (grant application, ecological support) and cooperation matchmaking (introducing developers and foundations/Ware groups, looking for wallet-NFT market cooperation, expanding connections within the ecosystem, etc.)

The controversial point is why SW and SF do not continue to actively support such work after this person's work has stopped. Generally speaking, SF is doing developer activities in various parts of the world and building local communities is a good strategy, such as delivering 5M funding to African communities, and the foundation directly going to the Middle East community to do community growth and other initiatives, which are very eye-catching and can also build local connections. In the Asian market, the number of developers, the number of users, and the total amount of funds are leading the world (data should be listed). SF and SW have done almost nothing, and many other public chains (monad bera pi (doge)) have come to the mainland and Hong Kong to do various developer, user, and investor activities. In the context of SF and SW being busy with construction in other regions, are they ignoring a large market? The controversial point is that when it comes to the mainland, Ware and the Foundation have information or difficulties that ordinary people do not know.

Summary of the strategy

Some data and research are still in progress, so the summary of Starknet here is only a partial summary based on current information. The best thing SW and SF do is: through continuous developer airdrops and funding, community-led open source projects and technical documents, online and offline developer activities around the world, and support for the independent development of each localized developer community, they have cultivated, activated, expanded and stabilized a large, united developer community that pursues excellent technology for Starknet. This community has developed most of the useful and a few useless infrastructures on Starknet, but has formed a unique community culture. However, the role of attracting users and funds for the development of ecological innovative applications is very limited. This pot should be borne by the SF community and funding department - that is, a considerable number of high-quality development resources have not been converted into a certain proportion of high-value APPs.

The SF-led funding plan has limited effect on the growth of ecological projects, but it stabilizes the basic ecological base, which is offset by the continuous decline in currency prices and the number of users. The funding plan cannot guarantee that the quality of existing projects will continue to improve. On the other hand, the developer community has not guided developers and teams to produce projects that meet hot spots, have wealth effects, and have sufficient innovation and current use value.

The most promising full-chain game on the user side is innovative enough, but the user experience, token economy and have not been accepted by the market, and need to be developed.

After the departure of the original StarkWarew CEO Uri, the commercialization part of Starknet seems desperately bad. Social media content and public relations show very obvious technical hardcore and user unfriendliness, almost completely missed all the hot spots of the 24-25 cryptocurrency circle, Memecoin and other user-side application ecosystems have no focus, business cooperation is formal and has no conversion rate, and the continuous decline in token prices and user loss have formed a new Davis double kill - the price decline has caused users to suffer losses and leave, and the loss of users has reduced the public chain's revenue and market valuation, and the profits of all public chain projects have further reduced buyer demand and the price of the currency has fallen.

Therefore, based on the information and thinking I have collected so far, I can make a small summary of Starknet: In the few months after the 24-year airdrop period, Starknet missed the development window of almost three quarters due to the failure to stabilize the currency price, users and application ecology and the neglect of hot spots. The next is an embarrassing bottleneck period - the developer community continues to produce some projects but there is no continuous increase in funds and users. Since Starknet has invested in some cutting-edge infrastructure such as AA, BTC ZK, application chains and full-chain games, it will have the opportunity to return to the center of the market through emerging application innovations in the future, but that will be a while later.

Writing background

Finally, I will attach some of my work experience to increase the value of this article. I am a grassroots MOD, the director of the Starknet Civilian Investment Promotion Office. I want to write a lot of sensational words here, but I don’t feel manly enough. The reason why I haven’t built Starknet recently is also due to psychological reasons.