The new year is coming, and with it, the flood of yearly recaps. But considering all that’s happened in 2024, we simply couldn’t resist adding our own.

Starknet has massively improved its performance on every front over the past year—becoming faster, cheaper, and even breaking the Layer-2 record for sustained TPS. Various performance optimizations made that possible, as part of a concerted effort to make Starknet the most performant Layer-2 network, fully prepared for the mass adoption of blockchain.

On top of performance, Starknet has made meaningful progress in its decentralization journey and has continued to nurture its fast-growing community. Today, more than 100 million STRK is being staked by the community as a part of the first phase of Starknet staking launched in November. This was made possible after several prerequisites to staking were achieved, which you will read about below.

Without further ado, let’s examine some of Starknet’s biggest hits of 2024 to gain a more complete view of this year’s progress.

1. STRK distributed to the community

On February 14, the Starknet Foundation distributed STRK to the community for the first time. Almost 500 million tokens were claimed by more than 600,000 users during the first round of the Starknet Provisions Program.

Today, STRK is used for paying transaction fees, staking, and shaping the long-term evolution of the Starknet protocol through participation in governance votes.

2. Starknet Foundation launches DeFi Spring

Also launched in February, the DeFi Spring program helps DeFi projects bootstrap their go-to-market efforts by supporting liquidity providers on participating DeFi protocols. The Starknet Foundation allocated 40 million STRK in the first round of the program.

3. StarkWare unveils Stwo

StarkWare announced the development of its new STARK prover, “Stwo” at the end of February. The TLDR is that it’s extremely efficient (more on that later).

Based on a mathematical breakthrough StarkWare jointly developed with Polygon Labs, Stwo is slated to reach Starknet mainnet in early 2025 by being integrated into StarkWare’s Shared Proving (SHARP) framework. And yes, it will be open-source from day one.

4. Starknet implements EIP-4844 support

One of the most highly anticipated changes to Ethereum, EIP-4844 went into effect on March 13 and helped L2s reduce their Data Availability (DA) costs by introducing “blob data”—a new data resource only for L2s. Starknet supported EIP-4844 from day 1, enabling a 100x reduction in gas fees for its users.

5. Starknet Foundation launches Seed Grants program

On May 6, the Starknet Foundation launched a program designed to propel innovation on Starknet by providing early-stage teams with grants of up to $25,000 USD paid in STRK. The program is still up and running, and you can apply here.

6. Starknet Foundation launches Growth Grants program

Another great Starknet Foundation program launched this year provides grants of up to $1 million in non-dilutive funding to support later-stage projects actively growing the Starknet ecosystem. This one, too, is still live. Apply here.

7. StarkWare sets a new proving record with Stwo

Four months after it was launched, StarkWare’s next-generation Stwo prover shattered the world-proving record with more than 500,000 hashes proved per second on a commodity quad-core CPU. Stwo’s throughput proved 940x higher than that of Stone, StarkWare’s first-generation prover, and 50x higher than ethStark. Remember: Stwo is coming to Starknet in early 2025.

8. ‘Bolt’ upgrade makes transactions faster and cheaper

Dubbed “Bolt” by the community, Starknet’s V0.13.2 upgrade was introduced in late August and turbocharged scalability on the network on multiple fronts. The result was:

  • Under 2-second confirmation time for most transactions.
  • Half the fixed L1 costs.
  • Expanded network capacity.

More on that last point in a bit.

9. Starknet holds its first community vote on mainnet

On September 10, STRK holders participated in Starknet governance for the first time since STRK was distributed to the community during the first round of Starknet Provisions. The vote introduced the token-minting curve to enable staking rewards, paving the way for the first stage of Starknet staking. Powered by onchain-voting protocol Snapshot X, the vote also took place entirely onchain for the first time.

10. Starknet becomes the fastest L2 by sustained TPS

On October 29th, players of Cartridge‘s addictive tile-flipping game, Flippy Flop, tested Starknet’s network capacity. The network averaged 127 transactions per second that day, shattering the L2 record. This was made possible by the Bolt upgrade mentioned above.

Flippy Flop proved to be a massive UX success as well, showcasing what’s possible with Starknet’s native account abstraction:

  • No wallet needed: Thanks to Cartridge‘s use of passkeys, users played Flippy Flop without needing a wallet or seed phrase.
  • Signatureless gameplay: Users played without having to sign a single transaction, thanks to Cartridge’s session keys.
  • 0 fees: Thanks to Paymaster, users didn’t have to pay fees or bridge to Starknet in order to play.
Credit: @Starknet_OG , posted on X

11. A brother is born

The Starknet brother meme was born after Starknet raised the bar for sustained TPS, showcasing how effective it can be when the community rallies around major technical accomplishments.

Zooming out, the Starknet community has had a year filled with dozens of successful community events and meetups. Most recently, members of the community gathered at Stark Space Bangkok, during Devcon, and there are many events to keep an eye out for going into the new year.

Check for events near you →

12. Starknet fees slashed further with Starknet V0.13.3

Introduced in November 2024, this version upgrade ensures Starknet fees will remain low even if demand for Ethereum blobs rises by changing the way Starknet packs data into blobs. It also optimizes block packing on Starknet to further cut fixed L1 costs.

Learn more →

Further fee reductions are coming in V0.13.4—stay tuned for updates.

13. We saved the best for last: Phase 1 of staking goes live on mainnet

The first phase of staking went live on mainnet in November, opening the door to anyone holding STRK to contribute to Starknet’s security and maintenance. Today, more than 100 million STRK is being staked by the community. This is a huge milestone in Starknet’s decentralization journey, and we look forward to continuing this journey with the Starknet community.

To learn more, visit Starknet’s staking page.

Delegate your stake →

What’s next?

Over the past year, Starknet has drastically improved its performance and made progress in its decentralization journey, all as the Starknet Foundation introduced ways to support the community. There will be much more of this to come in 2025, brothers and sisters.

On that note, take a moment to share your thoughts and help shape the future of Starknet in our quick user survey.

Keep an eye out for updates to the Starknet Roadmap.

Follow Starknet on X.