Starknet 2025: Year in Review

In 2025, Starknet quietly leveled up. Not just “faster” or “cheaper,” but more complete, more mature, and far more ready for real-world usage. A battle-tested ZK stack, a Web2-like UX powered by account abstraction, and massive onchain compute unlocking trading, gaming, consumer apps, and privacy at scale, this is Starknet moving from potential to production.

This article is a structured overview of that pivotal year. We’ll cover raw performance, the decentralization trajectory (staking and the roadmap), the opening of the SN Stack to more builders, and the ecosystem’s acceleration: BTCFi, privacy, interoperability, and the emergence of a real DeFi layer.

The goal is simple: give you a clear read on what was actually built in 2025, and why it sets up a 2026 where Starknet won’t just compete on tech, but also on distribution and value at scale.

As this article aims to recap a full year across a very large ecosystem, while also explaining why Starknet made certain choices and where it stands today, it’s naturally on the long side. I’ve condensed it as much as possible without losing substance, focusing on the key highlights and insights, and supporting them with charts and visuals. If it’s still too long for you, feel free to jump straight to the sections that interest you most:

1. Stack Optimization: Starknet, the Leading Rollup
   1. The critical upgrades of 2025
   2. Starknet’s Current Standing
   3. The SN Stack: opening this leading ZK stack to every builder and project
2. Beyond Speed: The Path to Decentralization
   1. Why Decentralization is Non-Negotiable
   2. Pushing Decentralization: The Staking Phased Approach
   3. The Dual-Token Security Model: BTC Staking Goes Live
   4. Staking Momentum: Metrics going bananas
3. Interoperability Progress: Starknet as a First-Class Multichain Citizen
   1. Circle & CCTP: native USDC and institutional rails
   2. LayerZero & Stargate: omnichain messaging and liquidity routing
   3. Hyperlane: permissionless messaging to 140+ chains
   4. Xverse, Atomiq Labs, Runes bridge, Garden: BTC & Runes into Starknet
   5. Near Intents: chain abstraction into Starknet
   6. RocketX: 180+ chains and CEX liquidity
4. BTCFi + Bitcoin
   1. Team expansion
   2. Infra progress
   3. Concrete use cases today
5. Starknet, a Privacy Engine in the Making
   1. Context: why focus on privacy now?
   2. Ztarknet: The Programmable Layer for Zcash
   3. Privacy Ecosystem on Starknet
6. Ecosystem evolution
   1. Partnerships
   2. Ecosystem projects shipping & grants programs
   3. All use cases available for users at the end of 2025
7. 2026 for Starknet

Stack Optimization: Starknet, the Leading Rollup

After four years in production, Starknet is clearly establishing itself as the best Rollup on the market, not just among ZK-Rollups, but across the entire available Rollup stack. This is evidenced by Starknet’s current performance and the massive future potential it enables.

The critical upgrades of 2025

2025 saw the release of several important updates aimed at optimizing Starknet

Starknet v0.13.5 (March)

The release of Starknet v0.13.5 brought immediate benefits, including lower fees for both users and developers, a generally improved DevX, and crucial optimizations in preparation for the subsequent Starknet v0.14.0 upgrade.

Most notably, this version introduced a major innovation: Starknet became the first Rollup to optimize its usage of blobs (Ethereum’s dedicated L2 data storage space) through Stateful compression. This efficiency is crucial because it ensures that even when Ethereum blobs are in high demand across the ecosystem, Starknet’s optimized usage keeps user fees lower than most competitors.

Reaching Stage 1 Rollup Status (May)

In May, Starknet became a Stage 1 Rollup. As a reminder:

• Stage 0 = Centralized: Operators have full control, but Ethereum stores enough data to verify the system’s state.
• Stage 1 = Autonomy (Training wheels are off): Smart contracts replace centralized operators. A proof system is in place. Crucially: users can withdraw funds without relying on any single operator. A diverse but constrained security council still exists.
• Stage 2 = Full Ethereum-grade trustlessness: Users have 30 days to exit in case of a controversial upgrade. The security council can only act under extreme, on-chain-proven conditions. At this point, the Rollup is as decentralized and secure as Ethereum itself.

For detailed changes made between Stage 0 and Stage 1 for Starknet, you can dive into the L2Beat thread here.

Becoming a Stage 1 Rollup is a massive step toward decentralization. Now that the “training wheels are off,” the Starknet ecosystem is doubling down on everything possible to fully decentralize the network.

Starknet v0.13.6 (July)

This was a minor yet extremely important upgrade as it paved the way for Starknet to be compatible with S-two, StarkWare’s next-generation prover.

Starknet v0.14.0 alias “Grinta” (September)

Starknet v0.14.0 is arguably one of the most impressive upgrade in Starknet’s history, primarily because it introduced a major milestone in its decentralization journey while providing significant UX and DevX improvements.

This upgrade made Starknet the first (and only) Rollup in production to be powered by a Decentralized Sequencer Architecture.

This is especially important now, as more discussions criticize Rollups for relying on centralized sequencing, a main reason why some big players are choosing to launch their own L1s outside of Ethereum.

On Starknet, this is no longer the case. Three sequencers are now running in rotation. Having multiple sequencers means no single entity can halt the chain or extract MEV. Currently, all three are run by StarkWare, but soon anyone will be able to participate, as full decentralization of sequencing is slated for 2026, meaning all Starknet validators will run their own sequencers.

On top of that, a lot of UX and DevX Improvements came with Grinta:

• Pre-confirmations: Dropping transaction latency for users from 2 seconds to ~0.5 seconds.
• Block times: Reduced from 30 seconds to 4 seconds.
• Mempool Implementation: FIFO ordering is gone, and transactions are now prioritized by Tips.
• v3 Transactions Only: From now on, only v3 transactions are supported, and they require STRK for gas fees. To pay in other tokens, a paymaster (powered by AVNU) is required.
• Fee Market for l2_gas: Inspired by Ethereum’s EIP-1559 (base fees + tips; base fees are not yet burned).

S-two Integration (November)

S-two, the next-generation prover, was successfully integrated into Starknet Mainnet in November of this year, delivering a x100 increase in efficiency over its predecessor (Stone).

S-two not only outperforms Stone but also beats other leading ZK VMs by up to 28x.

This marks a significant performance leap for Starknet, and it is only the MVP of S-two: major optimizations are coming to increase it.

Being more efficient at proving means faster and cheaper proving, thereby unlocking a range of new use cases.

For instance, Client-side Proving is now possible, and will unlock a wide array of privacy use cases such as private DeFi, zk-ID, verifiable AI, and more; notably, Paradex is now using it to offer privacy-preserving trading to its users. Furthermore, S-two facilitates Decentralized Validation, as everyone can now prove using it (client-side proving), enabling Starknet’s validators to adopt this capability in the future.

This prover is already live on Starknet and Paradex, and soon all projects using the SN Stack or StarkEx will also benefit from its power.

Starknet v0.14.1 (December)

This upgrade looks minor on paper, but it’s actually one of the most important of the year: it lays the groundwork for healthier economics and sustainable decentralization.

The key change is the alignment between gas fees and real costs: gas fees increase slightly for users while staying within industry standards (transfers still below $0.01). This will enable Starknet to shift more responsibility to validators while keeping them viable, and will greatly improve Starknet’s economics. Other improvements:

• More efficient use of block space and less variance in block times when the network is quiet.
• A 1559-style mechanism that ties fees more closely to congestion and makes pricing more predictable.

Considering all these advancements, how does Starknet stand today?

Starknet’s Current Standing

Starknet has been live since 2021, and its underlying technology has been powering production systems via StarkEx since 2020. This makes it the most battle-tested ZK technology in the market, having already powered $1.5 trillion in volume and executed over 1 billion transactions.

Crucially, its underlying technology powers three of the top 10 Perp DEXs (Paradex, Extended, edgeX), giving it a significant footprint in the market: StarkWare powers ~16% of the total Perp volume, neck-and-neck with Hyperliquid and Aster.

Starknet is also the only rollup in production that uses a proving system (ZK-STARKs) without any trusted setup or assumptions. This ensures a higher level of trustlessness compared to other rollups. On top, Starknet is powered by a proving system that is quantum-resistant. We can assert that Starknet is the most quantum-secure blockchain today.

If you want to dive deeper into the quantum topic, here are two great pieces of content covering it: Bitcoin quantum-security with STARKs & Bitcoin Has a Quantum Problem, while Starknet Has the Answer.

In summary, Starknet is undeniably the most battle-tested and secure ZK Rollup Stack on the market. Nothing else comes close. In terms of raw performance:

• TPS Capacity: Increased from 500 to over 1,000.
• Gas Fees: Remain lower than $0.001 on average throughout the whole year.
• Transaction Latency: Reduced from 2 seconds to 500 ms.

Starknet has notably recently achieved record-breaking throughput on Mainnet, with peaks of 2,630 UOPS and a sustained rate of 273 UOPS over an entire day.

Consequently, Starknet is approaching the TPS needs of Web2 giants such as Stripe or Nasdaq, and has plans to increase this capacity to over 10k TPS.

Beyond raw performance, Starknet also offers:

• Web2 UX with Web3 Guarantees via Account Abstraction (AA): Starknet provides a seamless experience thanks to Native AA, allowing invisible wallets, 2FA/3FA security, Session Keys, Gasless & Gasfree UX, one-transaction-everything, etc. And unlike in other ecosystems where developers must work with both EOAs and AA-based accounts, all accounts on Starknet are smart contracts. This ensures all tooling, infrastructure, and dApps provide a unified UX/DevX.
• Highest On-Chain Compute: Starknet provides the most compute on-chain, which is vital for Perp DEXs, fully on-chain gaming, AI, and advanced DeFi. This is not a coincidence that Starknet’s technology powers 3 out of the top 10 Perp DEXs by volume, generating over $150B volume per month, and also boasts the most advanced fully on-chain gaming ecosystem in the entire space.

• Most Long-Term Oriented Team: The network is powered by the most long-term oriented and innovative team in the ZK space (StarkWare).

All in, Starknet already sits in a rare spot: a ZK stack proven in production at massive scale, with top-tier security guarantees and performance that’s starting to rival Web2 rails. Built for real applications, with native AA and serious onchain compute already powering category leaders.

In short: battle-tested today, and structurally positioned to keep compounding its lead as the ecosystem pushes toward the next order-of-magnitude.

The SN Stack: opening this leading ZK stack to every builder and project

Every builder and project can now leverage this stack to build their very own Starknet. Indeed, the Starknet ecosystem launched the SN Stack at the beginning of 2025, allowing builders to create a custom environment tailored to their apps and business needs.

In addition to enjoying all the elements mentioned above, one of the main, often overlooked, advantages of the SN Stack is that it allows builders to fully focus on their business. Since the stack is fully ready, they passively benefit from all optimizations brought by the Starknet ecosystem (all upgrades made on Starknet are easily transferable to all chains leveraging the SN Stack). Builders can also personalize the chain to their needs, allowing them to push performance as much as possible, as Karnot showed by pushing the stack’s performance to over 7,000 TPS settled on Ethereum.

Furthermore, they have the choice to either launch as an L2 Appchain or as an L3 on top of Starknet for even greater performance and efficiency. During the year, two projects successfully launched an L3 to test the environment in production:

• Dojo, which launched a game-chain for Nums

• Karnot, which released a temporary gamechain called Gridy

In short, the Starknet Scaling Buffet is ready, offering a UX that nobody else is providing. Pick your layer, launch your project, abstract the pain, and scale your business.

Two projects are already pioneering the use of the SN Stack:

• Paradex, the Starknet Appchain OG, building a chain tailored to all trading needs (Perp, spot, options, etc.), offering better-than-CEX execution, privacy trading, and zero fees.
• Privily, building a Neobank, featuring full self-custody, privacy, and a Web2 UX.

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In short, all the hard bets StarkWare made five years ago are starting to pay off handsomely. Starknet is the best ZK stack on the market, and everyone can leverage it. And this is just day 1. In the near future, Starknet will be:

• A network capable of handling over 10k TPS.
• Transaction speed below 500ms.
• Fully decentralized (sequencing and proving).
• Quantum secure.
• With privacy at the protocol level

Beyond Speed: The Path to Decentralization

We cannot discuss Starknet’s infrastructure without focusing on the heart of its consensus: Staking. Over the course of 2025, major improvements have been made, establishing Starknet today as having one of the strongest staking foundations in the entire industry, all achieved in just one year.

Why Decentralization is Non-Negotiable

To fully appreciate the staking progress this year, let’s first examine the rationale behind Starknet’s commitment to decentralization.

A blockchain that is merely cheap, fast, and scalable is now simple to achieve; any project marketing those attributes as unique is being disingenuous. However, possessing those features without decentralization is ultimately meaningless. At its core, a blockchain is simply a database, a very inefficient database, given that Web2 services offer systems thousands of times more efficient.

But a blockchain endowed with decentralization transcends a simple database; it becomes a trustless coordination engine, where no single entity or group can censor, block, or steal your funds. This conviction is why Starknet has built its foundation with decentralization in mind since Day 1. It would have been far easier to sacrifice decentralization for immediate speed or scale, but that runs contrary to the core ethos of blockchain, Bitcoin, and Ethereum. The graveyard of centralized actors in crypto (Mt. Gox, FTX, Celsius) serves as a stark reminder: sooner or later, the same kind of collapse will happen to an on-chain service that cuts corners. In the centralized world, everything works, until it doesn’t. And when it breaks, you lose everything.

Starknet currently inherits the security of Ethereum through STARK proofs, ensuring that funds are secure on Starknet as they are secured by mathematics and Ethereum’s validators. However, StarkWare is currently the sole operator of the network. While it cannot steal your funds, it currently could:

• Censor your transactions
• Extract MEV on your tx
• Halt the network

This is the state of all current Rollups, but it won’t be the case for Starknet for much longer.

And while decentralization often leads to performance loss, this will not be the case for Starknet. This is thanks to the Malachite consensus engine, developed by the Informal Systems team. Malachite is a flexible, high-performance consensus engine written in Rust, optimized for speed and reliability. Simply put, it is an ultra-fast and efficient consensus mechanism. As a result, a fully decentralized Starknet powered by Malachite is expected to be capable of sustaining over 10,000 TPS while being fully decentralized in the future.

Pushing Decentralization: The Staking Phased Approach

The year 2025 marked Starknet’s decisive moves toward full decentralization. Building on the foundation laid in the previous year, November 2024 saw the official launch of staking on Starknet. This made it the first Rollup to deploy a permissionless staking system on L2, with the ultimate goal being to fully decentralize the network and allow the community to operate the network while earning rewards.

Throughout 2025, Starknet intensified its decentralization efforts across multiple fronts, including:

• Decentralized Sequencing: The Starknet v0.14.0 (Grinta) upgrade (as mentioned in Part I) represented the crucial first step toward decentralized sequencing.
• Decentralized Proving: The S-two integration made decentralized proving accessible (though the system is not yet live).
• Moving from phase 1 to phase 2 of staking

While Phase 1 of STRK staking was live since November 2024, its primary purpose was foundational: to deploy the staking contract and gather real-time stability data. Because Starknet was the first L2 to transition from centralization, StarkWare needed community feedback to ensure system stability. After 8 months of testing, StarkWare gathered enough data to roll out Phase 2, launched in June 2025. The main goal of this phase is to improve staking economics, enhance validator transparency, and assign the first active roles to stakers. This step is essential to test their liveness before they take a formal role in Starknet’s consensus.

To pursue that, Phase 2 introduced two major changes compared to Phase 1:

• Block Attestation: Starknet now operates in epochs. During each epoch, validators must attest to randomly selected blocks. Failure to attest results in validators (and their delegators) losing their rewards. This mechanism improves transparency and ensures validators are active before full consensus duties arrive, allowing delegators to compare validator performance before choosing where to stake.
• Commission Flexibility: Validators can now increase their commission, but only under strict conditions. This adds flexibility without sacrificing fairness.

With Phase 2 successfully deployed, the final staking architecture is just two additional stages away.

Upon completion of these stages, Starknet will achieve full decentralization, powered by a decentralized network of sequencers and provers governed by a Proof-of-Stake mechanism. Resulting in a network fully operated by the community.

Beyond these core phases, Starknet also increased utility and flexibility by reducing the unbonding period for both STRK and BTC staking from 21 days to just 7, meaning faster liquidity and greater flexibility for stakers.

Wait, I didn’t mention BTC staking yet right?

The Dual-Token Security Model: BTC Staking Goes Live

At the end of October, the Starknet ecosystem launched BTC staking, making Starknet the first Rollup to tether its security directly to Bitcoin, and the first to employ a dual-token consensus mechanism (STRK and BTC).

This means that Bitcoin holders can now stake their BTC to secure Starknet and earn STRK rewards, launching a dual-token consensus model where STRK represents 75% and BTC 25% of the network’s total security weight.

And because Bitcoin is the ultimate store of value, this additional 25% security layer comes at a very low cost for the network: Bitcoiners, typically focused on long-term stability rather than chasing double-digit yields, strengthen Starknet’s economic base while earning sustainable returns.

Furthermore, this implementation directly tied BTC to STRK in a positive economic flywheel: The more STRK that is staked, the more the rewards pool increases. Crucially, the higher the STRK staked amount is, the higher the BTC-staking rewards become, as BTC stakers receive a fixed 25% share of the total STRK emissions. In addition, this mechanism means that as the STRK price increases, the value of the BTC rewards also increases proportionally, further strengthening the incentive. This increased APR draws even more BTC into Starknet’s consensus. Consequently, Bitcoiners have a clear incentive to stake their STRK and ensure STRK maintains real value.

As such, BTC staking significantly boosts STRK’s utility, reinforcing its role as Starknet’s core asset:

• default token for gas and staking
• governance token
• main DeFi collateral
• flywheel mechanism with Bitcoin

The result is a true win-win for both ecosystems:

1. Bitcoiners help secure Starknet at low cost while reinforcing STRK’s role at the heart of the ecosystem, gaining access to meaningful, ultra-low-risk yields as Bitcoin becomes fully integrated into a living DeFi economy secured by ZK tech.
2. Starknet gains increased security and stability at a low inflation rate.

With the arrival of BTC staking, the new parameters of Starknet’s staking are as follows.

Staking Momentum: Metrics going bananas

The launch of staking phase 2, the integration of BTC staking, combined with the reduction of the unbonding period, has generated impressive momentum around Starknet’s staking ecosystem:

• Institutional Custody: Anchorage Digital, one of the most trusted institutional custodians, integrated both STRK staking and BTC staking. This allows institutional clients to securely collect rewards through Anchorage’s custody while helping decentralize the network with both Bitcoin and STRK.
• Anchorage Validator: Anchorage also joined the network as a validator, staking over 50M STRK.
• Figment Support: Figment also supports STRK staking, further expanding institutional delegation options.
• Delegation Programs: To aid decentralization, both StarkWare and the Starknet foundation launched delegation programs, supporting the network by delegating STRK to eligible validators.
• StarkWare Validator: StarkWare launched its own validator, with over 70M STRK staked

Putting all of this together, the staking metrics saw exponential growth this year:

• The ecosystem started the year with 110M STRK staked and finished it with over 1.1B STRK, an x11 increase.

This already represents over 23% of the circulating supply staked, just one year after launch. For context, Ethereum needed three years to hit the same ratio, and four years to reach 30%.

At this pace, Starknet should cross the 30% mark sometime in 2026, meaning it will get there in under two years from launch.

As for Bitcoin, BTC staking grew from zero to over 1,700 BTC staked in only three months.

Fun fact, the BTC staked value (~$160M) is currently superior to the STRK staked value ($100M).

All this momentum was achieved at a very low cost, as the inflation brought by staking since launch amounts to only 33M STRK (less than $4M), or 0.33% of annual inflation.

If you want to participate in STRK or BTC staking, you can do so either:

• As a Validator
• As a Delegator

To become a validator, you will find all the information you need to get started here.

As a delegator, you have two primary options:

• Simple Delegation: Delegate to a validator directly. You can compare all validators, their fee policies and liveness on Endur or Voyager.
• Liquid Staking: Liquid stake through Endur.

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Starknet is not just building yet another fast L2; it is delivering the only Rollup in production with a clear path to full decentralized and quantum-secure solution. With a decentralized sequencer and prover network coming, coupled with the success of the STRK and BTC staking models, Starknet is setting the definitive industry standard for trustless, scalable, and secure L2 interactions, fulfilling the core ethos of blockchain at every layer.

Interoperability Progress: Starknet as a First-Class Multichain Citizen

One of the most persistent criticisms of Starknet in recent years has been the lack of robust interoperability solutions, which made it relatively complex for users and capital to enter the ecosystem. This wasn’t accidental: it stemmed from the deliberate choice to build a highly ZK-optimized ecosystem, fully independent of the EVM, in order to unlock unique applications and performance. While this path comes with major long-term advantages, it also meant a higher integration cost for projects used to EVM “copy-pasta” deployments. Short-term pain for a massive long-term unlock.

But as Starknet became more relevant, especially around decentralization, privacy, and BTCFi, that calculus changed. Over 2025, a growing number of major interoperability providers decided Starknet was worth the effort, making it one of the very few non-EVM ecosystems (alongside Solana, Sui, and Aptos) to be integrated at this depth.

In 2025 alone, ten major interoperability / bridging projects integrated Starknet.

Let’s walk through them.

Circle & CCTP: native USDC and institutional rails

The biggest unlock for stablecoin and capital flows came from Circle: native USDC and Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) are now fully live on Starknet Mainnet. This gives Starknet direct access to the world’s largest regulated stablecoin and to Circle’s burn-and-mint infrastructure for secure cross-chain transfers.

Concretely, this means:

• Native USDC on Starknet, not just a wrapped USDC.e version.
• CCTP-powered transfers that make it much simpler and safer for users and institutions to move liquidity to Starknet.
• A smoother onboarding funnel for exchanges, wallets, and payment flows that already rely on Circle’s stack.

For Starknet, this is the foundational stablecoin integration and the base layer for serious DeFi, BTCFi, and institutional use.

LayerZero & Stargate: omnichain messaging and liquidity routing

LayerZero, the leading omnichain interoperability protocol, is in its final stages of integrating Starknet, with full deployment expected around early January. LayerZero currently connects 150+ blockchains and routes the majority (~60%) of stablecoin flows of the entire market across its network.

What this unlocks for Starknet:

• Omnichain messaging: smart contracts on any chain connected to LayerZero can read and write data to Starknet, and Starknet contracts can do the same in reverse.
• OFT standard: builders on Starknet can issue Omnichain Fungible Tokens (OFTs) that exist natively across multiple chains without wrappers, which is particularly important for BTCFi and liquid staking assets.
• Liquidity via Stargate Finance: with LayerZero also comes Stargate, one of the leading bridges built on top of LayerZero, enabling deep, cross-chain liquidity routing directly into and out of Starknet.

For many users, LayerZero + Stargate on Starknet will simply mean: your existing multichain flows will now include Starknet as a first-class endpoint.

Hyperlane: permissionless messaging to 140+ chains

Hyperlane, one of the main interoperability networks, has also integrated Starknet into its interoperability stack, connecting it to a network of over 140 chains. This is especially powerful for builders because Hyperlane is very dev-friendly:

• Teams can deploy their own custom bridges tailored to their app and risk model.
• Any cross-chain use case (messaging, bridging, yield strategies, intent systems) can plug directly into Starknet.

A few projects are already live on top of this:

• Daydreams launched a Solana ↔ Starknet bridge for the DREAMS token, bringing it onto Starknet for the first time.

• Forge Yields is building cross-chain yield strategies powered by Hyperlane under the hood.

• StarkGate (by StarkWare) now supports a Solana ↔ Starknet bridge that lets users move assets like SOL, DREAMS, TRUMP, JUP, BONK, PUMP, and Fartcoin between Solana and Starknet.

• Paradex relies on Hyperlane to power part of its bridging experience.

Xverse, Atomiq Labs, Runes bridge, Garden: BTC & Runes into Starknet

On the Bitcoin side, 2025 is the year Starknet drastically upgraded its offering for Bitcoiners, as we’ll explore in the next section. And today, it’s trivial for Bitcoin users to move into Starknet:

• Xverse: the leading Bitcoin-focused wallet is now fully integrated with Starknet and its ecosystem. Xverse users can move from Bitcoin to Starknet and access Starknet apps from a single interface, both on browser and mobile. This is a major unlock for onboarding native Bitcoin users into Starknet DeFi, games, and more.
• Atomiq Labs: the only cross-chain swap service secured by Bitcoin’s PoW has integrated Starknet, enabling cross-chain swaps between Starknet and Bitcoin with zero slippage.
• Runes bridge: in May 2025, StarkWare deployed the first-ever bridge that allows Runes (Bitcoin memecoins) to move from Bitcoin to Starknet, bringing Runes liquidity and speculation into Starknet’s more trading-friendly environment.
• Garden Finance: Starknet is also integrated into Garden, an intent-based bridge that connects Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperliquid, Berachain, Arbitrum, and Base to Starknet. This makes Starknet a natural endpoint for users already using Garden for cross-chain intent routing.

Near Intents: chain abstraction into Starknet

Another key piece of the interoperability puzzle is Near Intents, which has integrated Starknet into its chain-abstracted, intent-based swap infrastructure.

As users, you can swap assets from any of Near Intents’ ~25 supported chains directly from Starknet. Supported ecosystems include, among others: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, NEAR, Arbitrum, Base, BNB, Polygon, Gnosis, Avalanche, Solana, Sui, Aptos, Berachain, Monad, Aurora, XLayer, UTXO chains like Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and more. In particular, you can now swap over 100 assets into STRK from any chain supported by Near Intents.

This integration also opens up powerful options for builders, thanks to its API-first approach. which means Starknet dApps can integrate cross-chain swapping directly into their own UI via widgets or APIs.

RocketX: 180+ chains and CEX liquidity

Finally, Starknet is live on RocketX, offering a more “liquidity-max” approach to bridging. RocketX aggregates over 180+ chains and taps into CEX liquidity by executing swaps on centralized exchanges (Bybit & HTX) through its own accounts, then delivering the resulting funds (minus fees) to users on Starknet.

This has two main consequences:

• Large swaps can be executed with minimal slippage, even when onchain liquidity is shallow.
• Users who don’t want to manually manage CEX + bridge flows get a one-stop interface: onchain in, onchain out, CEX in the middle.

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In short, out of the top bridging and interoperability stacks by volume, Starknet is now already integrated into:

• Circle CCTP
• Hyperlane
• Near Intents
• with LayerZero + Stargate following right behind (early January).

In addition, Starknet is also integrated with a variety of niche bridging solutions.

For a non-EVM ecosystem, this level of coverage is a very strong market signal. It means infra teams see real value in Starknet’s stack and narratives (scaling, ZK, BTCFi, privacy), enough to justify the integration work.

So what’s next?

We made big improvements, but the job’s not finished.

The next steps include:

• Full LayerZero and Stargate Finance integration in January
• Deeper connectivity via Near Intents, also expected in January, further enriching intent-based routing options
• Alpen bridging, a BTCFi-focused solution enabling Bitcoin liquidity to flow into Starknet without wrappers (more on this in the Bitcoin section)

Taken together, these integrations close the interoperability gap and position Starknet as a first-class citizen of the multichain economy, not just for Ethereum-native capital, but also for Bitcoin, Runes, Zcash, and beyond.

BTCFi + Bitcoin

In June 2024, StarkWare publicly announced a old ambition: scaling Bitcoin alongside Starknet.

At the time, the path to “BTCFi on Starknet” was still mostly research-driven. But in 2025, that thesis moved from vision to execution: after a year of preparation, Starknet shipped concrete products and partnerships that make it a credible home for Bitcoin utility beyond simple hodling.

Team expansion

Expanding into Bitcoin didn’t come at the expense of Starknet’s other core priorities (performance, scaling Ethereum, privacy, DevX and UX). Instead, 2025 was marked by a clear acceleration in hiring and dedicated focus:

• Ulrich Haböck, one of the leading researchers in Circle STARKs, joined with deep industry experience (ex-Polygon, Orbis Labs, Horizen Labs). His work is centered on pushing S-two efficiency further, unlocking more use cases, improving prover economics, and advancing the Bitcoin x STARK research agenda.
• A dedicated Bitcoin-focused exploration team was formed to deepen and accelerate R&D around Bitcoin x Starknet.
• Jack Liu, a long-time industry operator (ex-Circle, ex-OKX), joined to help drive user-facing Bitcoin use cases, expand Starknet’s footprint in APAC, and co-manage (with StarkWare) a $2M Bitcoin Seed Fund.
• Dan Held joined as an advisor to support Bitcoin-oriented go-to-market strategy.

From the inside, it was also a year of meaningful expansion on the BD side, while the Starknet Foundation increasingly centered its efforts on making the “Bitcoin economy” on Starknet tangible.

Infra progress

Several improvements have been made on the infrastructure side to strengthen Starknet’s Bitcoin economy.

A trust-minimized path for native BTCFi

The most structurally important step is the StarkWare x Alpen partnership, aiming to enable BTCFi on Starknet without relying on wrapped BTC assets.

The goal is to deliver, in 2026, a highly trust-minimized bridge between Bitcoin and Starknet, powered by a cryptographic verifier (“Glock”) on Bitcoin. In simple terms: BTC can be locked on Bitcoin and unlocked elsewhere only if the burn/withdrawal conditions are proven, verified directly on Bitcoin, rather than relying on multisigs or custodial wrappers.

When delivered, this will remove one of the biggest frictions for BTCFi: the trust assumptions around bridging.

Asset Runes: exposure to Ethereum assets while staying on Bitcoin

StarkWare also launched Asset Runes, Bitcoin-native tokens that provide 1:1 exposure to assets backed by reserves on Starknet, while staying minted on Bitcoin.

The first asset introduced is USDC. The mechanism:

• USDC is minted as a Rune on Bitcoin (an Asset Rune).
• Each unit is backed 1:1 by locked reserves on Starknet.
• To redeem, users bridge to Starknet via the Runes Bridge and redeem trustlessly at the contract level.

So 1,000 USDC Runes on Bitcoin = 1,000 USDC locked on Starknet, and the supply on Bitcoin cannot exceed the reserves on Starknet by design.

With this, Bitcoin users can swap BTC ↔ USDC directly on Bitcoin (via wallets like Xverse and venues like Dot Swap & Magic Eden), while still retaining a clear redemption path to Starknet. USDC bridging between Bitcoin and Starknet is live on StarkGate.

If there’s enough demand, the Starknet ecosystem will expand to more assets, as this mechanism can support any ERC-20 (ETH, STRK, etc.).

Thanks to this product, and for the first time, Bitcoiners can diversify without ever leaving the most secure chain.

Interop broadening: more routes, more wallets, more liquidity

Beyond this Bitcoin-native route, Starknet also expanded the practical on-ramps and liquidity options: Atomiq Labs, Garden Finance, Runes on StarkGate, deeper Xverse integration, and upcoming LayerZero. For details, see the previous section on Interoperability.

Major Bitcoin wrappers were also integrated across Starknet DeFi:

• wBTC native
• tBTC
• LBTC
• SolvBTC

Building the long game: research, infrastructure, and strategic support

As the leading research team in ZK and scaling, and with a strong public-good ethos, StarkWare also delivered breakthrough research and made long-term strategic commitments on the Bitcoin front in 2025.

Research highlights:

• ColliderVM: a research breakthrough exploring how to enable stateful computation on Bitcoin today without fraud proofs, improving on BitVM by removing long fraud windows and reducing capital constraints. Still R&D, not production-ready yet.
• S-two proving milestones: proving 16 years of Bitcoin history for under $15, and proving the entire Bitcoin header chain on a Raspberry Pi in ~25 ms.
• Broly: a proof of concept enabling users to inscribe on Bitcoin directly from a Starknet wallet via a storage-proof-like mechanism, open-source and ready for builders to experiment with.
• S2morrow: a STARK-based zkVM effort to batch-verify post-quantum signatures and benchmark proving time, proof size, and verification speed across schemes.

Beyond R&D, StarkWare also signaled a long-term posture: building a strategic reserve of BTC and ETH, with a stated intention to accumulate more Bitcoin over time.

StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation also announced donations to three key Bitcoin organizations and initiatives, Human Rights Foundation, Open Cash, and OpenSats, supporting the broader Bitcoin ecosystem alongside product development.

Okay, interoperability is improving, Bitcoin infrastructure is getting stronger, the team is growing, research is moving fast… cool. But what can you actually do with BTC on Starknet today?

Concrete use cases today

If 2024 was the thesis, 2025 was the 0→1 moment for Starknet’s Bitcoin economy. With 30+ projects, 10+ categories of use cases, and 50+ strategies, Bitcoin on Starknet is becoming real.

Here are the main use cases available today.

BTC staking and liquid staking

The anchor use case is BTC staking, enabling Bitcoin holders to stake BTC on Starknet to help secure the network and earn rewards (details covered in the Staking section). The key takeaway: it ties Starknet’s security story to Bitcoin in a way that feels legible to Bitcoiners, and it creates a base layer for additional products.

A major extension is Endur liquid staking: users can stake BTC, earn yield, receive xyBTC, and then use xyBTC across Starknet DeFi.

Example flow: deposit xyBTC on Vesu → borrow USDC → deploy that liquidity across trading on Extended, yield on Extended or Ekubo, real-world spending via Ready Card, or buying more Bitcoin.

Beyond staking: kickstarting real BTCFi usage

To go beyond staking, the Starknet Foundation launched BTC Season, an incentive program designed to bootstrap the BTCFi economy on Starknet with 100M STRK allocated across three priorities.

• BTC liquidity on DEXs (Ekubo and Spline): deepen liquidity and improve Bitcoin trading conditions across the ecosystem.
• BTC liquidity on lending markets (Vesu, Uncap, Opus): jumpstart lending/borrowing and BTC-based looping strategies.
• Subsidized rates for BTC-collateralized borrowing: make Starknet the most attractive venues in the market to borrow against BTC.

And the ecosystem quickly followed.

Re7, for example, is building on top of it to offer a market-neutral, BTC-denominated strategy for institutions (targeting ~20% APR). And while the fund is designed for institutional players only, retail users can still access it via Midas, which tokenized the fund. That tokenized exposure can also be used as collateral across Starknet DeFi.

Beyond Re7 fund, here is a non-exhaustive set of notable additions:

• AVNU: BTC assets support + the ability to pay gas fees with BTC assets via paymasters.
• Uncap: the first stablecoin fully backed by Bitcoin on Starknet.
• Re7 Yield aggregator: optimizing passively liquidity management on top of Ekubo pools.
• Spline Finance: BTC-powered stablepools built on Ekubo.
• 0DFinance: one-click vaults to generate yield on BTC.
• Ready: BTC staking + Vesu vaults integrated directly into wallet UX.
• Noon Capital: USN + sUSN (yield-bearing version) deployed on Starknet.
• Typhoon: mixer expansion to support BTC wrappers + lowering fees for Bitcoin pools
• Braavos + Lightning: Lightning payments usable from Starknet via the Braavos wallet, allowing users to pay in the real world across the U.S. and worldwide anywhere Lightning is accepted, by scanning a QR code.
• Nostr tipping with STRK
• Private Cashu funding via Starknet

So, what you can do with BTC on Starknet right now

With BTC on Starknet, users can:

• Trade spot (including DCA and limit orders)
• Provide liquidity (passively via aggregators or actively)
• Lend, borrow, and loop
• Stake and liquid stake
• Access institutional-style strategies
• Mint BTC-backed stablecoins
• Pay (via Lightning integrations through Braavos, or using USDC with the Ready Card)
• Use BTC assets to pay gas (using AVNU’s paymaster)
• Run cross-chain strategies from Starknet

And to get started, if you’re not on Starknet yet, the path is simple:

1. Create a Starknet-compatible wallet
   
2. Bridge to Starknet
   

From there, two useful entry points to start your DeFi journey:

• BTCFi landing page: a curated hub for the most popular strategies and gathering all the projects building Starknet’s Bitcoin economy.
• Starknet Earn Portal: bridge and access yield opportunities in a few clicks through a unified interface. Note that the Portal is still in beta, so more strategies and improved UI/UX are coming, including ongoing work on EVM wallet integrations.

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2025 is when Starknet stopped talking and just researching about Bitcoin and started building a Bitcoin economy people can actually use. And I can confidently say this: Starknet is now the place to do more with your BTC. 2026 will accelerate this momentum. The ecosystem will notably add an important feature to Bitcoin: privacy.

Starknet, a Privacy Engine in the Making

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) are the strongest tool we have to solve two structural problems in blockchains: scaling without sacrificing decentralization, and bringing privacy back as a base-layer property.

At a high level, ZK boils down to two superpowers:

• Concealment: you can prove something is true without revealing the underlying data.
• Compression: you can summarize a massive execution into a short proof that anyone can verify cheaply.

That combination is why ZK is uniquely suited to deliver both scale and privacy. And after four years of pushing the stack to production-grade scalability, Starknet is now in a position to seriously go after privacy, while continuing to improve throughput and cost.

Context: why focus on privacy now?

Starknet approached this in a deliberate order: scale first, privacy next. Privacy tech has existed in crypto for more than a decade, but without low fees, maximum throughput, strong UX, and mature developer tooling, it stays niche. And when Starknet launched in 2021, the market needed scalability more urgently than privacy.

Today, the imbalance has flipped: execution capacity has improved dramatically across the industry, while privacy at scale is still largely unresolved, and the real world is moving in the wrong direction.

Governments and corporations keep expanding surveillance capabilities: CBDC discussions, platform-level monitoring, location tracking, and AI-driven analysis that makes correlation and profiling easier and cheaper than ever. The list goes on.

Blockchains, in their default transparent form, amplify the problem even further. On most chains (Bitcoin, Ethereum and its L2s, Solana, Sui, Monad…), anyone can see:

• what you hold
• how much you hold
• your full transaction history
• who you transact with
• when you do it
• and sometimes where you do it (through behavioral patterns and off-chain correlations)

So the threat isn’t just from “states and big corporations” anymore, it’s from EVERYONE on the internet.

And the risk isn’t only surveillance, it’s market structure. In crypto, information has direct monetary value. If your activity is public by default, you’re effectively giving away high-signal financial metadata for free, and adversarial behavior becomes the rational outcome.

Never in human history has a person been this predictable to outside entities. And the digital age is only amplifying it.

The conclusion is uncomfortable but simple: you have nothing to gain and a lot to lose by being fully transparent onchain.

Institutions understand this too. They’re coming onchain, but most of them will require confidentiality that stays verifiable.

But there are two pieces of good news:

1. Market participants are starting to realize they need privacy more than ever, as shown by the recent Zcash pump and the meta led by people like Naval, Balaji, Mert, and others.
2. In 2025, we saw a meaningful shift in the US conversation. Treasury removed the economic sanctions on Tornado Cash in March 2025. And on December 15, 2025, the SEC hosted a Crypto Task Force roundtable specifically on “Financial Surveillance and Privacy.”

This doesn’t solve privacy, far from it, but it signals something important: privacy is back on the agenda, in public, with ZK as one of the key technical paths being discussed.

Right now, if you’re an onchain user trying to break monitoring, your options are limited:

• Mixers: heavy regulatory risk, and they mostly provide anonymity, not flexible confidentiality.
• CEX routes: they can break linkability, but they also fully deanonymize you (and they learn your new wallets).
• Zcash-style systems: excellent for private transfers, but historically limited in programmability and/or scale for richer applications.

We need a better endgame, and Starknet is here to answer the call.

Today, Starknet is perfectly positioned to tackle privacy, because it is now:

• powered by the best ZK stack in the market, and every component of its architecture is designed to be ZK-friendly, from the language to the proof layer, hash functions, and more
• fast, scalable, and providing massive compute for builders to go fully onchain (advanced perp features, fully onchain gaming, etc.)
• delivering Web2-grade UX thanks to Native Account Abstraction
• fully secure, on a path to full decentralization and quantum-security

Starknet’s endgame is to become the scaling and privacy engine for the chains that matter: Ethereum first, expanding into Bitcoin via BTCFi, and exploring Zcash alignment as a natural next candidate.

Great, but what has Starknet shipped, and what is it building right now on privacy?

Ztarknet: The Programmable Layer for Zcash

Zcash is an acknowledged pioneer that treats privacy as a core protocol primitive, not an optional application feature. Inspired by Bitcoin, it enforces a hard-money policy (capped 21M supply and periodic halvings) while offering selective privacy through the choice between transparent and shielded transfers.

The significant increase in funds within Zcash’s shielded pool confirms a tangible and growing demand for these privacy guarantees.

In addition, Zcash is widely regarded as the best privacy-focused blockchains today, boasting a range of notable supporters such as Balajis, Naval, Cobie, Mert, and Edward Snowden, to name a few.

Despite its strength in confidentiality, the Zcash base protocol (L1) presents two major limitations:

1. Limited Programmability: It is difficult, if not impossible, to build sophisticated applications (like UX-rich DeFi protocols or “full-stack” apps) directly on the L1.
2. Restricted Scalability: Throughput is very constrained, averaging around 27 TPS capacity for transparent transfers and only 7 TPS for shielded transfers.

These are insufficient for planetary adoption and for supporting a wide range of use cases beyond simple private transfers.

Ztarknet is an ambitious proposal designed to solve these issues. It is a Starknet-based L2 that brings the scalability and programmability required, while remaining rooted in Zcash’s privacy ethos.

The core principle is simple: Ztarknet operates as the external computation layer (the “GPU of Zcash”):

• Computation on L2: Application execution and complex transactions occur on Ztarknet, which uses STARK technology to prove the accuracy of state changes.
• Security and Privacy on L1: Zcash remains the conservative privacy base that secures value and final settlement.

The integration relies on Transparent Zcash Extensions (TZEs), a mechanism currently under proposal. A TZE functions as a constrained “yes/no oracle,” validating the STARK proofs generated by Ztarknet directly within the L1 consensus.

Crucially, this mechanism does not increase L1 complexity or require changing economic rules or shielded pools. The only change? Adding a single proof-verification port to the protocol.

This approach enables the construction of complex programs (lending, borrowing, efficient AMMs, DEXs) on Ztarknet, leveraging Starknet’s optimized engine and Cairo language, thereby unlocking confidential DeFi on top of Zcash.

For holders, Ztarknet unlocks real utility for ZEC across the programmable ecosystem:

• L1 Fees: L2 block settlement transactions (posting proofs) pay ZEC fees on Zcash.
• L2 Base Asset: ZEC is bridged and becomes the base asset on Ztarknet (1:1 representation, with provable withdrawals on L1).
• L2 Gas Fees (Optional): L2 gas can optionally be denominated in ZEC to deepen usage.

In short, Ztarknet lets activity migrate to a fast, programmable L2, while keeping privacy, value, and security anchored to Zcash’s solid base layer.

Three important notes at this stage.

First: StarkWare’s exploration team has already demonstrated feasibility. They built a specialized testnet with the needed TZE implementation and a STARK_VERIFY TZE, then verified a STARK proof of real Ztarknet blocks through it.

And the first app is already live: the collaborative pixel-art game from Starknet, Art/Peace, now Zart/Peace on Ztarknet..

Second: the production design is not finalized yet. For example, the team is still exploring options like dual settlement with Starknet, or a Ztarknet-specific Starknet fork with seamless interoperability between Starknet ↔ Ztarknet, so users can access both ecosystems with minimal friction. We should know more in 2026.

Third: the UX engine making Zcash’s comeback possible, NEAR Intents, has also integrated Starknet. This makes it possible to swap STRK ↔ 120+ assets across 20+ chains (and vice versa) without traditional bridging flows. Phase 2 of the NEAR Intents integration is expected in the coming weeks.

If you want to dive deeper:

• Official proposal to the Zcash community
• Ztarknet website
• X account
• Explorer
• Quickstart (deploy Noir / Aztec ecosystem apps)
• Full tutorial to get started

Also worth nothing: Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO of StarkWare, co-founded Zcash. Seeing StarkWare explore a path to scale Zcash and unlock new use cases feels like a full-circle moment, deepening the technical ties between his two founding projects.

Privacy Ecosystem on Starknet

Putting Ztarknet aside (already a major piece), Starknet is currently growing a full privacy ecosystem with building blocks across the entire stack: core infrastructure, private payments, private trading, privacy pools, a privacy neobank, and data-preserving protocols.

Infrastructure:

• Starknet, actively building a privacy-focused ecosystem, with an ambition to eventually bring privacy closer to the protocol level in 2026
• Ztarknet, covered just before
• S-two, StarkWare’s next-gen prover, is a major unlock for client-side proving and privacy use cases at scale. A client-side proving SDK is in the works, and anyone can already start building with S-two today
• Garaga, a Starknet/Cairo toolkit that brings high-performance elliptic-curve and pairing operations on-chain, and enables generating/verifying SNARK verifiers (e.g., Groth16, Noir verifiers)

Private payments

• Tongo, a protocol providing an SDK that lets apps integrate confidential ERC-20 transfers. You can start building with it right now
• Mist Cash, cross-chain compliance-minded private payments, allowing to send anything to anyone privately, while keeping compliance features
• AFK, privately funds a Cashu wallet from Starknet for Bitcoin payment
• Curvy, a Privacy-First Transactions protocol

Private trading

• Paradex, a state-of-the-art perp DEX offering privacy on perps (orders, positions, trades), the only Perp DEX offering that today at scale
• Privfi, privacy swaps powered by TEE:

1. Privacy pools and mixers

• Typhoon, the first mixer live on Starknet:
• Ekubo Privacy pools, a mixer-like design with compliance in mind
• 0xbow, also a mixer-like design with compliance, coming to Starknet

Privacy neobank

• Privily, building a neobank as a Starknet appchain, aiming to deliver full user privacy while remaining on-chain and self-custodial

Data-preserving protocol

• Olas, a confidential data-preserving protocol enabling, among other things, confidential peer prediction markets
• Calimero Network, a protocol allowing to build self-sovereign applications where your data stays on your device and all interactions are encrypted and verified.

On top of already advanced projects, the Zypherpunk hackathon took place a few weeks ago, and Starknet took part in it. So we can expect the Starknet privacy ecosystem to grow significantly in the next few months.

Beyond hackathons, there’s active experimentation happening right now across both StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation. A few concrete examples include confidential transfers on Zashi (the Zcash mobile wallet) and a community proposal for a trustless atomic swap bridge enabling XMR ↔ STRK/ETH using DLEQ proofs.

On the developer side, the ecosystem is also becoming more accessible: Noir developers can verify Noir proofs on Starknet without writing a single line of Cairo, thanks to the Garaga SDK. That means faster iteration, cheaper verification, and a much wider pool of builders who can leverage Starknet’s proving performance for privacy-focused dApps.

Finally, there are also early signs of privacy gaming starting to take shape within the Dojo ecosystem. This is a particularly strong angle for Starknet, because none ecosystem has anything close to Starknet’s combination of gaming tooling, infra, and ecosystem.

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So Starknet is the best placed network to bring privacy at scale without sacrificing UX, and it’s clearly leaning into that direction right now.

And for good reason: the “crypto” in cryptocurrency comes from the Greek kryptós, literally meaning hidden or secret.

If you zoom out, the market has already lived through two major eras of adoption: first hard money (Bitcoin proving decentralized value transfer), then programmability (smart contracts and on-chain applications). The next era is increasingly about privacy, not as an optional feature, but as a core primitive.

Hard money and programmability will keep improving, probably through steady, incremental progress. But privacy is different: the gap between “some privacy” and usable privacy at planetary scale is still massive. That’s closer to a 1 → 100 shift than a 100 → 1000 refinement.

Even Satoshi himself was already thinking about how zero-knowledge proofs could fit into Bitcoin’s design space, recognizing both the potential and the difficulty of applying them in practice.

Thanks to that same ZK technology, by the end of 2026, Starknet will be scaling the three most important pillars of Web3:

• Hard money: Bitcoin via BTCFi and trust-minimized bridging; Zcash via Ztarknet
• Privacy: by scaling Zcash privacy, and pushing toward privacy features at the protocol-level on Starknet
• Programmability: by scaling Ethereum execution, and offering a top-tier environment for fully onchain apps thanks to throughput, speed, and compute

Ecosystem evolution

As the stack keeps getting optimized, BTC staking and BTCFi use cases keep expanding, privacy keeps getting closer, and interoperability keeps improving rapidly, Starknet ecosystem projects leveraged this momentum to accelerate significantly this year.

Partnerships

Let’s start with partnerships. The Starknet ecosystem formed a large number of meaningful collaborations this year. Obviously, I won’t repeat the ones already mentioned earlier (LayerZero, Circle, Hyperlane, Near Intents, Xverse, Re7, etc.).

Here are some newer ones worth highlighting:

• Blockstream x StarkWare, combining Blockstream’s new Bitcoin scripting language with STARK proofs
• AltLayer x Starknet, supporting distribution and adoption of the SN Stack
• Privy x Starknet, bringing the leading embedded-wallet solution to the ecosystem
• Xfounders x Starknet, expanding offline events and builder meetups for 2026
• Dfns x Starknet, adding enterprise-grade wallet infrastructure
• Kaito x Starknet, integrating the Starknet community into the leading InfoFi platform
• Espacio Cripto x Starknet Foundation, joint support for founders across Mexico and Latin America
• Informal Systems x Starknet, bringing IBC to Starknet to connect with the Cosmos ecosystem
• Irys x Starknet, adding a new data layer for builders
• Daydreams x StarkWare, OTC deal and liquidity support on the DREAMS/STRK pair from StarkWare
• Token Terminal x Starknet, enabling anyone to build custom dashboards to track Starknet data
• RareSkills x Starknet Foundation, helping Solidity developers transition to Cairo
• Alchemy Pay x Starknet, letting users worldwide buy & sell with cards, mobile wallets, and 50+ fiat currencies
• Aeon x Starknet, letting Starknet users spend STRK online and offline at 50M+ merchants, from cafés to stores, turning Starknet’s scaling power into everyday utility

Ecosystem projects shipping & grants programs

During 2025, new teams shipped to mainnet, existing apps expanded their scope, and the surrounding support layer (grants, infrastructure, integrations) made it easier to build and scale. The result is a denser, more diverse ecosystem, with more real use cases live and more builders showing up to push them forward.

Support programs from Starknet Foundation and StarkWare

To better support the ecosystem and help teams accelerate their missions, both StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation launched several support programs.

The first major initiative is the pair of delegation programs launched by both StarkWare and the Starknet foundation. The goal is to support the validator ecosystem and further decentralize the network. As of today, over 300M STRK has been delegated by these two entities.

On the StarkWare side, several initiatives were launched, including two funds:

1. A $4M Venture Fund focused on accelerating blockchain innovation in Africa, including mentorship, technical expertise, ultra-efficient infrastructure for builders (Public Starknet or the SN Stack), and funding up to $500,000.
2. A $2M Bitcoin Seed Fund to help build user-facing Bitcoin projects in APAC.

StarkWare also launched a program designed to reward deeply involved community members (both developers and content creators): the WPL program. It rewards contributions to Starknet’s growth, whether through content, tooling, or project development. In other words: anyone can contribute, and anyone can get rewarded fairly. The first phase of the program has an initial budget of 5M STRK.

You can also browse available bounties here.

On it, projects can create their own bounties, too. That means:

• Projects get instant access to Starknet’s creator and developer community to fuel growth.
• Creators and developers get an open platform to find gigs tailored to their skills, and earn.

A clean win-win for Starknet’s growth.

More details here.

On the Starknet Foundation side, for users:

• DeFi Spring, still live (but close to ending at the time of writing), distributing STRK (90M in total) to liquidity providers.
• BTC szn, a recent program allocating 100M STRK to bootstrap the Bitcoin economy on Starknet.

For developers, mainly:

1. Propulsion v2: covers gas fees for eligible dApp users, up to $1M in total coverage.
2. Payments Builder Grants: grants for payment-centric projects, with monthly STRK support to fund user acquisition

Ready

During this year, Ready was, without a doubt, one of the applications that shipped the most in the Starknet ecosystem.

Their main focus this year was the Ready Card, and they executed hard around it:

• They publicly launched the Ready Metal Card: zero hidden fees, cashback, full custody, and acceptance anywhere Mastercard is supported, enabling real-world payments using USDC held on Starknet.
• The initial rollout relied on a whitelist/waitlist, but the Metal Card was later restocked, opening access more broadly.
• They also shipped the Lite Card, a free tier offering the same core benefits but with lower cashback.
• On top of that, Ready Card got integrated with Google Pay, so you can pay with your phone. Apple Pay is coming next.

Here are the Ready Card metrics since launch: up-only, with new ATHs month after month.

And if someone is still wondering “what is Ready?”, it’s Argent’s rebrand.

Beyond the card, Ready kept pushing hard on UX and DevX, turning the wallet into a real everything app:

• Integrated AVNU Paymaster, so users can pay gas in 10+ tokens directly inside the wallet.
• Shipped Easy Bridging with LayerSwap to fund a Ready wallet from virtually any chain or CEX.
• Added Bank Deposit (150+ countries; EUR/GBP/MXN/BRL/AED), enabling direct bank-to-Starknet deposits without going through CEXs or eating high fees.
• Introduced desktop ↔ mobile compatibility between Ready and Ready Wallet, syncing the same wallet seamlessly across devices.
• Integrated key in-wallet products so users can do DeFi without leaving the wallet UI: Vesu lending/borrowing, Extended perps, and staking.

Speaking of staking: Ready is currently the leading validator for both STRK staked and BTC staked.

Finally, Ready released its Invisible Wallet SDK, aiming to easily build a Web2-like UX for users. This single SDK includes

• Smart accounts
• Session keys
• Gasless transactions

Braavos

On the Braavos side, 2025 was clearly the year of Bitcoin-first UX.

First, they launched a feature that isn’t live anywhere else on the market: the ability to pay for real-life purchases using STRK from your Braavos wallet, leveraging the Lightning Network.

They also integrated:

• Vesu markets, and Atomiq Labs to their wallet, allowing 1-click bridge and earn on Braavos with Bitcoin.
• Bitcoin staking into the wallet UI, allowing Bitcoiners to stake from the UI.
• Atomiq Labs to power their cross-chain swap feature.

Beyond Bitcoin, Braavos also improved the DeFi experience:

• Released an in-wallet DeFi portfolio tracker, making it easier to track positions and claim rewards.
• Integrated AVNU’s token list to automatically surface tokens available on AVNU directly in the Braavos UI.

Extended

Extended has been one of the biggest unlocks in Starknet’s DeFi history.

Built by an experienced team of ex-Revolut executives, they went live on Starknet in August, bringing perps trading to the ecosystem with serious depth:

• Up to 100x leverage
• 70+ pairs, including TradFi pairs (EUR/USDC, Gold, Nasdaq, S&P 500, Brent)
• An XP campaign for traders and liquidity providers
• A community LP vault yielding ~14% APR in USDC since launch

In only a month, they became the #1 app on Starknet by TVL, and recently crossed the $100M milestone.

They are also generating ~ $1B in daily volume.

Beyond perps, one major innovation they introduced is XVS.

Basically:

• You deposit USDC into the Extended vault, which runs advanced market-making strategies and earns fees (~14% all-time APR for LPs).
• In return, you receive XVS, a tokenized share of the vault.
• Extended lets you use XVS as collateral to trade perps.

So you can earn yield while trading and holding perp positions, a massive unlock for capital efficiency.

On top of that, Extended launched builder codes, allowing developers to build alternative frontends, custom strategies, or new use cases on top of Extended. In return, they earn fees on every trade routed through their users.

This is major for:

• Builders, who can leverage Extended’s liquidity, network effects, and infrastructure to create new apps.
• Users, who gain access to far more than perps: new strategies, new interfaces, new products.

As of today, here is a list of projects building on top of Extended:

• Ready, perps integrated directly into the wallet UI
• Karnot / Arcx Trade,1-click funding arbitrage between Extended and Paradex
• Tengu, trade Extended perps via Telegram

• Shift Protocol, hedged strategy vaults + tokenized vaults integrated into DeFi
• Nomina, funding rate arbitrage across Hyperliquid, Extended, and Lighter
• Mithril, strategies across multiple perp DEXs
• TreadFi, perp DEX/CEX aggregator
• XTrade, trading aggregator
• Origamin Tech, trading strategies powered by bots
• Dotrade, trading aggregator

AVNU

AVNU, the leading DEX aggregator and paymaster provider, is without a doubt the app powering the entire Starknet’s spot trading UX. As usual, they shipped a lot this year.

On integrations (to improve execution and pricing), AVNU plugged into:

• Layer Akira v2 (CLOB DEX)
• Remus (CLOB DEX)

They also got integrated across the ecosystem:

• Ready, powering the gasless UX (on top of the swap feature)
• Xverse, powering the swap feature, and gasless UX
• ForgeYields, improving UX and routing best rates
• Braavos, powering token lists
• Endur, helping deliver best execution for Bitcoiners

They even integrated Cartridge Controller into AVNU, allowing gamers to swap with the best pricing:

In terms of tokens, it’s simple: they basically integrated every token available on Starknet, not just for trading, but also as paymaster tokens. A few examples:

• The Leading Bitcoin memecoin
• tBTC
• All BTCFi assets
• Assets brought by Layer Akira: SOL, ZRO, BONK, JUP, ARB, FARTCOIN, SHIB, TRUMP

And beyond integrations, they shipped core infra:

• Starknet Paymaster: open-source SDK, audited + permissionless, enabling apps to sponsor/abstract gas in minutes
• New documentation + SDK
• A TG builders community to support teams building on top of AVNU
• Became a Starknet validator and reached top-3 by STRK staked
• A restaking feature (claim + stake rewards in one click)

Paradex

Paradex, the only Starknet appchain live in production, kept proving what the Starknet Stack can do when pushed by a team that ships fast. In 2025, the trajectory was clear: growth in TVL, volume, and open interest, driven by constant product iteration.

TVL moved from roughly ~$25M at the start of 2025 to $140M+ as of writing.

Daily volume and OI also surged over the year.

And this growth can be explained by several factors, most notably, the team’s ability to ship, iterate fast, and keep pushing new primitives.

For examples:

• Perp Options were made publicly available to all users
• Paradex became available on both Google Play and the iOS App Store, making mobile access frictionless
• ~85% of Paradex’s codebase has now been audited by Cairo Audit
• The Paradex Chain Testnet is now live, allowing Cairo devs to build on both Starknet and Paradex. It’s the first public chain after Starknet to be accessible to Cairo devs:
• Paradex integrated the Grinta upgrade into its chain, bringing a brand-new mempool, a decentralized sequencer architecture, sub-second transaction speeds, and additional performance improvements:

But the most important updates, in my opinion, are the three following ones:

• Paradex now offers 0% trading fees for retail users, both maker and taker, across 100+ perpetual pairs. In other words: retail users pay no fees to trade on Paradex.
• RPI, enabling meaningfully improved pricing for users. Paradex shipped this feature ~6 months before Binance implemented it, validation of the Paradex vision.
• Privacy perp trading, bringing privacy to orders, positions, and trades. Paradex is the only perp DEX offering this at scale today.

Combine those three, and Paradex is offering a unique mix: better-than-CEX execution, zero fees for retail, and privacy, on a single platform, in full self-custody.

Paradex is also the only Perps venues offering both perps and options, and it’s planning to expand into spot as soon as January, plus stocks & forex soon after.

And as shown in this tweet, yes: the DIME token (Paradex’s token) is expected to launch in February, right after the end of the Paradex Season 2 XP program.

Money Badger’s first drop has also already happened, so there may be another surprise before the DIME launch.

Overall, 2025 feels like the runway. If they keep this pace, 2026 could be the year Paradex hits escape velocity.

Ekubo

In 2025, Ekubo mostly focused on expanding to EVM chains. Results there have been a big flop so far, but the most important signal for us is that Ekubo’s TVL on Starknet held up over the year, helped in particular by the BTCFi campaign by the Starknet Foundation.

In terms of shipping, Ekubo launched:

• Limit orders, allowing traders to buy/sell at a precise price, avoid slippage, and automate entries/exits.
• Multihook, allowing builders to build up to 16 extensions per pool, compared to only 1 extension per pool before.
• Open-sourcing of Privacy Pool, and waiting for someone to finish the work on it. Privacy pool is basically a Tornado-like feature but with regulatory compliance.

Ekubo also saw new teams building on top:

• Re7 launched a yield aggregator that passively manages Ekubo LP positions (deposit once, let the algo handle the rest), and it’s already crossed $10M TVL.
• Spline Finance, a project building BTC-backed stablepools.

Finally, Vesu integrated the Ekubo token to borrow USDC, so you can use your Ekubo beyond just holding.

Vesu

Vesu, the leading money market on Starknet, used 2025 to consolidate and deepen its offering, with a focus on assets, UX, security, and distribution.

• Expanded asset coverage (including Ekubo token and BTC assets)
• Launched Vesu v2 to improve UI/UX and consolidate liquidity
• Welcomed new curators, such as Re7
• Doubled down on security with upgraded contracts and multiple independent audits
• Integrated Noon Capital’s yield-bearing stablecoin for lending and borrowing
• Improved distribution via wallet integrations (Ready and Braavos), enabling users to earn/borrow against WBTC directly inside wallet UIs
• Will soon power Bitwala Bitcoin loans (listen around ~2min50 if you want to learn more)

As a result, Vesu kept pushing to new highs across all metrics in 2025.

Note: the dashboard below doesn’t include V2 pools (where most of the TVL now sits), so the past two months’ numbers aren’t accurate, they should be at ATH across the board.

Focus Tree

Focus Tree, the leading consumer app on Starknet, offering students a gamified way to stay focused while being fully onchain, hit major milestones in 2025.

The biggest one was the launch of the Focus Tree Wallet, which turns nearly every Focus Tree interaction into an onchain action. The trick: users don’t even realize they’re interacting with a blockchain, thanks to a Web2-like UX enabled by:

• Paymaster provided by AVNU
• An invisible wallet co-developed with Ready

This means users don’t have to pay gas fees, click through pop-ups for every action, or deal with the seed-phrase headache.

Thanks to this approach, and a strong product-market fit with students, Focus Tree has brought 1M+ blockchain newcomers onchain, all on Starknet.

This is only the beginning, as Focus Tree is now:

• entering the US market
• exploring ways to bring DeFi to these users

Endur

Endur, Starknet’s liquid staking protocol, made significant progress in 2025. Notably:

• launched Phase 1 of its points program, focused on STRK liquid staking.
• rewarded early users by giving back all fees generated at the time (~$40k) to the community.
• integrated BTC assets into liquid staking.
• launched its Points Program Season 2, introducing BTC liquid staking and deeper DeFi integrations.

With Endur, users can now liquid stake both STRK and BTC, then deploy these assets across Starknet DeFi, for example:

• AVNU for trading
• Ekubo for liquidity provision
• Vesu for lending/borrowing
• Troves to optimize yield

Endur has clearly pulled ahead in Starknet’s LST market, and is now the leading, and only, liquid staking provider.

Troves

If one protocol truly had a renaissance in 2025, it was Troves.

They went from roughly $100k TVL at the low point of the year to around $15m TVL as of today, mainly by fully embracing BTCFi and integrating it into their strategy stack.

Troves is now one of the best places to optimize Bitcoin-denominated yield.

Among other updates:

• formerly STRKFarm, they rebranded to Troves.
• they integrated Ekubo pools as building blocks within their strategy offering.

Opus

Opus made two big moves in 2025.

The first was integrating BTCFi assets into the app, allowing users to borrow CASH, Starknet’s first native stablecoin, with these assets.

As a result, you can now borrow CASH against:

• WBTC, tBTC, SolvBTC, LBTC, and Endur’s liquid staking assets
• STRK & xSTRK
• LORDS, EKUBO, ETH, and wstETH

But what can you do with CASH?

You can earn yield with it, and that’s Opus’ second big move: integrating U.S. Treasury yield (T-Bills) into its staking module.

With CASH, you can stack multiple yield sources:

• Provide liquidity in the CASH/USDC pool on Ekubo to earn swap fees
• Stake your LP position (as an NFT) on Opus to receive 75% of protocol revenue + additional yield sourced from T-Bills exposure

CASH has been generating 20%+ APR recently.

Also worth noting: Opus is the only DeFi protocol on Starknet offering insurance coverage against smart contract exploit risk.

Layer Akira

In 2025, Layer Akira finally shipped the missing pieces to make it a fully operational CLOB DEX:

• Charting, trade history, order book depth, and other advanced tooling
• The launch of limit orders, letting users set prices in advance and let the market come to them:

They also introduced multiple new tokens to Starknet with enough liquidity to trade, including: SOL, ZRO, BONK, JUP, ARB, FARTCOIN, SHIB, and TRUMP.

Uncap

Uncap launched on Starknet in October and has already reached $1M TVL.

The protocol lets users deposit BTC-backed assets to mint USDU, a stablecoin fully backed by BTC, using a mechanism inspired by Liquity v2. It’s also positioning itself as one of the cheapest places to borrow a stablecoin against BTC.

Gaming ecosystem

Starknet’s gaming ecosystem moved a lot this year.

Let’s start with the main infra provider: Cartridge.

• Users can now log in to Cartridge Controller using EVM wallets, Discord, and Gmail. As a reminder, Controller is the leading wallet for Starknet games: it’s widely integrated and delivers a Web2-like UX.
  

• Cartridge launched Cartridge Credit, simplifying onboarding through unified cross-chain balances.
• They released Cartridge Arcade, a Steam-like hub that aggregates Dojo-powered games and tracks/ranks player activity.
• Controller also expanded beyond gaming and is now integrated into DeFi apps like AVNU, Opus, and Brove. What started as a gaming wallet is now pushing into DeFi too.

Building on top of that, Starknet games shipped major progress.

Realms (formerly Eternum), the flagship Starknet game, think Age of Empires x Travian primitives, but fully onchain, kept evolving, notably through:

• Launching Season 1 to keep testing and improving the game
• Introducing Blitz, a faster format: the same core gameplay, but compressed into a ~2-hour high-intensity war mode instead of week-long seasons
• Running ongoing community playtests in recent weeks to gather feedback ahead of the next season, and potentially move toward a more open/continuous version of the game:

The UI improvements in just one year are already obvious.

And here is the current UI:

Next: Blob Arena (Pokémon-inspired battles) and the studio behind it, Grug’s Lair:

• Blob Arena managed to break out beyond the usual crypto bubble by launching the game during an IRL sports event in front of thousands of people.
• The game is now live on App Store and Google Play.
• They hit 10k players.
• Grug’s Lair brought on Dante Horton, a gaming industry veteran, as an advisor.
• Grug’s Lair is also planning to enter the sports market with a new product.

Another emblematic Starknet game, Loot Survivor, also shipped big upgrades:

• They launched v2, notably with major UI improvements.
• The Loot Survivor community approved a proposal to use 200+ ETH from the treasury over the next eight months to buy back assets from the Lootverse ecosystem.
• They launched the SURVIVOR token via a fair public sale on Ekubo.

As of December 18, Loot Survivor ranked #1 on Starknet by transactions and #2 by fees generated.

Among other news:

• Dope Wars, one of Starknet’s OG games, completed its migration and is now fully live on Starknet.
• Jokers of Neon, a fully onchain poker-style game, is now live on both App Store and Google Play.
• Ponziland kept expanding its offering, integrating more tokens over time and running multiple contests.

And plenty of new games also launched on Starknet this year, as we’ll see next.

New projects live on Starknet Mainnet

Beyond the projects already well established on Starknet, ~50 new teams joined the ecosystem in 2025, either by launching directly on mainnet or by integrating Starknet into their stack.

DeFi

• Extended, a next-gen perp DEX built by ex-Revolut executives.
• ForgeYields, a cross-chain yield aggregator offering attractive yield on USDC, ETH, and BTC.
• Re7 Yield aggregator, a yield aggregator built on top of Ekubo.
• Re7 Capital, launching a BTC fund powered by Starknet yields.
• Uncap, a stablecoin fully backed by Bitcoin.
• Arcx Trade, a funding-rate arbitrage protocol between Extended and Paradex.
• Just Brove It, an app aggregating everything Bitcoin-related available on Starknet.
• Noon Capital, issuer of yield-bearing stablecoins.
• Typhoon Mixer, a privacy-focused mixer for Starknet.
• OdFinance, a DeFi vault manager.
• Shift Protocol, delta-neutral vaults built on Extended & Paradex, fully tokenized.
• Remus, a fully onchain orderbook DEX.
• Nomina, cross-chain delta-neutral strategies across Extended + Hyperliquid + Lighter.
• Kapan Finance; a lending aggregator optimizing borrowing and lending strategies.
• Numo, vault rebalancing for BTC yields.
• Stormbit, lending/borrowing with up to 99% LTV and no liquidations.
• Spline, a stableswap protocol for Bitcoin assets on Starknet (built on top of Ekubo).
• Privfi, a TEE-powered privacy swap.
• Tengu, a perp trading Telegram bot leveraging Extended.

Gaming/NFTs

• Ponziland, a strategy game where players buy, sell, and manage land (gamified DeFi).
• POW!, a clicker + educational game.
• Loot Survivor 2, a truly random, procedurally generated RPG dungeon crawler.
• Dragark, explore, craft, trade, and conquer.
• Dark Shuffle, a fully onchain card game.
• Budokan, a tournament platform with onchain payments, leaderboards, and prizes.
• Eternum S1 + Realms, a fully onchain Age of Empires x Travian-style game with integrated AI agents.
• Blobarena: a Pokémon-like game with a real-world-integrated universe (AMMA).
• Pistols: a 1v1 dueling game.
• Crimson Fate: a roguelike game.
• Dope World, an OG game whose full migration to Starknet is now complete (assets bridgeable and usable on Starknet).
• Lutte Arcade, a Lootverse battler.
• Schizodio: a new NFT collection that became the leading collection on Starknet.
• Wolf Nation, a new NFT collection.
• Karat, another NFT collection.
• OrugginTrail, a text-based adventure.
• The Popularium, built by veterans from Wizards of the Coast, Hearthstone, Diablo, and Xbox.
• Evolute, a Carcassonne x Mage Duels-style game (also live on mobile, and available on Apple Store and Google Play).

Payment

• Ready Card, pay IRL expenses with your USDC held on Starknet.
• Due Network, payments supporting 80+ countries and 30+ currencies.
• Copperx, pay users, vendors, or partners instantly in stablecoins on Starknet.
• Curvy, a privacy-focused protocol.
• MIST.cash: privacy transfers with full compliance.
• OneRamp: payments focused on Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Request Finance: crypto + fiat ops platform.
• Dash: a payments protocol designed to make Starknet transactions simple.
• Pay Mesh: a group payments protocol.
• Fundable: a one-stop platform for automated Web3 payments.
• Tongo, SDK to integrate confidential ERC20 payments into any app.

Other

• idOS, a reusable KYC protocol.
• Custos, a decentralized safe for signing agreements and recording crime videos.
• Fortuna Custody, the first European-licensed custodian for the Starknet ecosystem.
• Tubbly, a mobile app rewarding users for visiting specific physical locations.
• Capa, buy & sell USDC on Starknet directly from their platform.
• Crypto Tax Calculator, import Argent/Braavos wallets and generate tax reports.

Infrastructure projects

A lot happened in this category in 2025, but the most important highlights (in my opinion) were:

• Herodotus unlocking L3s on top of Starknet.
• Herodotus integrating S-two into Atlantic, making it easier for developers to leverage S-two in their projects.
• MetaMask Snaps integrated across many of Starknet’s major DeFi apps.
• A new invisible wallet SDK for consumer apps (and beyond) by Cavos.
• Cairo Coder launch by Kasar, enabling anyone to generate Cairo smart contracts/programs directly in Cursor, fully compatible with the Starknet dev stack and kept up to date. In simple terms: build on Starknet without writing a single line of Cairo.
• OpenZeppelin Contracts MCP launch to build and deploy dApps in just 3 steps: prompt an idea, generate the contracts, and deploy the app.
• Starknet Agents launch (Kasar), letting anyone create AI agents on Starknet in a few clicks (for DeFi users, gamers, or devs).
• Three new tools simplifying Cairo development: Starknet Play, build & deploy Cairo contracts in 30 seconds – Cairo Blocks, a drag-and-drop smart contract builder – Cairo Context MCP Toolkit, an MCP server enabling semantic search across Cairo docs using advanced vector search.
• Launch of the Daydreams facilitator on Starknet for x402 micropayments.

All use cases available for users at the end of 2025

As of today, here’s everything a user can do on Starknet.

A) Trading

• Trade spot with best execution (and DCA) via AVNU
• Trade spot with a CLOB-style UX on Layer Akira and Remus
• Trade spot, DCA, and place limit orders on Ekubo
• Trade perps across 70+ markets (including 5 TradFi ones) on Extended
• Cross-chain swap 50+ assets (including SOL and ZEC) into STRK via NEAR Intents
• Trade European-style options on Carmine
• Trade Extended perps directly from Telegram via Tengu
• Swap privately via Privfi

Tokens available to trade include:

• Starknet native assets: STRK, EKUBO, DREAMS, BROTHER, Schizodio, SLAY, SURVIVOR, LORDS, NSTR
• BTC assets: WBTC, LBTC, SolvBTC, tBTC
• Runes (Bitcoin memecoins): MIM, BILLY, PUPS, DOG, UNCOMMON GOODS
• Ethereum assets: ETH, ZRO, UNI, SHIB, ARB, ENA, POL
• Solana assets: TRUMP, SOL, BONK, FARTCOIN, JUP, PUMP
• Stablecoins: native USDC, bridged USDT, USN (Noon), USDU (Uncap), CASH (Opus)

B) Staking

• Stake STRK and BTC directly from Ready or Braavos, or via dashboards like Endur and Voyager
• Liquid stake STRK and BTC via Endur

C) Yield farming

• Provide liquidity directly on Ekubo, or via Re7 Yield Aggregator (volatile pools) and Spline (stable pools)
• Lend, borrow, and loop on Vesu, Nostra, or Kapan
• Access advanced DeFi strategies in one click with Troves
• Access Re7 Capital’s Bitcoin Institutional Yield Fund
• Earn yield with USDC on Extended, and use your LP position to trade perps
• Mint USDC on Bitcoin from Starknet (Asset Rune)
• Mint Starknet-native stablecoins with Uncap (BTC-only collateral) or Opus (multiple collateral options)
• Access cross-chain yield from Starknet via ForgeYields
• Generate one-click Bitcoin yield via Numo
• Use delta-neutral strategies on top of Extended via Shift Protocol and OD Finance
• Farm funding-rate arbitrage across Extended and Paradex via Arcx Trade
• Access Noon Capital’s yield-bearing stablecoins

D) Payments

• Pay IRL with Ready Card (works anywhere Mastercard is accepted + 3% cashback)
• Pay IRL via Braavos Lightning Network (only where LN is accepted)
• Pay privately via MIST.cash

E) Consumer apps

• Focus Tree: a gamified “stay focused” app that brings students onchain with a Web2-like UX.
• Realms (Eternum): a fully onchain strategy MMO (Age of Empires x Travian vibes) with seasons and wars.
• PoW: an addictive clicker that onboards users while teaching crypto basics.
• PonziLand: a DeFi metagame where players buy/sell/manage land and compete via token-driven mechanics.
• Blob Arena: Pokémon-inspired onchain battles.
• Art/Peace: a collaborative onchain canvas inspired by r/Place.
• Influence: a space strategy game about building, trading, and expanding an onchain economy.
• Loot Survivor: a procedurally generated onchain dungeon crawler with real randomness and permadeath energy.
• Dragark: a fantasy RPG/economy game where players explore, craft, trade, and conquer territories.
• Crimson Fate: a roguelike-style game with onchain progression and combat loops.
• Lootverse Battler (Lutte Arcade): a PvP battler set in the Loot ecosystem with onchain assets.
• Budokan: a tournament platform where anyone can run competitions with onchain entry fees and rewards.
• Jokers of Neon: an onchain poker-style strategy game playable on mobile.
• Pistols at Dawn: a dueling game built around 1v1 matches, skill, and onchain stakes/rewards.
• Dark Shuffle: a fully onchain card game mixing deck strategy with provable game logic.
• Dope Wars: the Dope World game universe, now fully migrated to Starknet with onchain items and gameplay.
• zKube: a puzzle/strategy experience built around onchain interactions and progression.
• OrugginTrail: a text-based adventure game with onchain choices and outcomes.
• The Popularium: a strategy game studio/project led by veterans from major Web2 game franchises.
• Evolute: a boardgame-style str
• Trade NFTs on Element: Schizodio, Wolf Nation, Karat

F) Other

• Launch your memecoin with Unruggable
• Mix assets via Typhoon Mixer
• Wolf Pack League (WPL) for devs and creators to earn rewards by helping the network grow

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As a result of these developments and the new use cases that went live in 2025, Starknet attracted strong capital inflows: #2 by net inflows this year, and one of only 9 out of 200+ chains in the green.

2026 for Starknet

So now the real question is: what should we expect in 2026? A lot.

The topic most readers probably care about is probably $STRK. Yes, STRK price action has been horrible since TGE, but the fundamentals improved meaningfully in 2025:

• STRK gained real utility: staking is live, it’s the only native gas token on Starknet, and the STRK ↔ BTC flywheel is starting, especially as BTCFi expands.
• Supply dynamics improved: we’re now close to ~50% of total supply liquid, while roughly ~23% of circulating supply is already locked in staking.

More importantly, two mechanisms are expected to ship in 2026 to (1) bring more revenue to the network and connect that revenue more directly to STRK, and (2) create stronger alignment between Starknet apps and the STRK token.

Some hints:

Beyond the token, and as every year, the infrastructure will keep improving: higher throughput, more TPS capacity, hopefully faster finality, and continued progress on decentralization.

This ties directly into Starknet’s Phase 4 roadmap, with major expected milestones such as:

• Alpen’s trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge, enabling BTCFi without wrappers (removing a major trust assumption in today’s BTCFi stack).
• Further block-time reductions: we’re around ~4 seconds today, with the goal of moving toward sub-1 second.
• EchoNet, a new test environment that mirrors Mainnet transactions in real time to catch discrepancies early and de-risk upgrades before they ship on the real Mainnet environment:
• Staking v3 + validator sequencing, while continuing to push toward prover decentralization (with full completion likely landing in 2027).
• A client-side proving SDK, making it much easier for teams to build privacy use cases on Starknet.

On privacy specifically, it’s reasonable to expect the Starknet privacy ecosystem to at least 3x in products and use cases. StarkWare is working both on privacy at the protocol level and on a unique product that ties BTCFi + privacy together, with the potential to generate meaningful activity and revenue. The current target is early Q2 2026.

In parallel, the Zcash track continues: pushing forward the effort to scale Zcash with Ztarknet.

On staking, we should also see:

• Delegation initiatives from SNF and StarkWare continuing to strengthen the STRK validator set.
• Onboarding additional “BTC flavors” to stake on Starknet as BTCFi infrastructure matures.

On the product side, a few other developments could materially improve distribution and UX:

• EVM wallet integrations (Q1 2026) and more strategies inside the Starknet Earn portal.
• More BTCFi projects and use cases onboarding as the bridge + liquidity stack deepens.
• More gaming and consumer apps coming out of the Dojo ecosystem.
• Finalizing LayerZero + Stargate integration (January).
• Phase 2 of ZTARKNEAR with NEAR Intents (January-February).

Internally at StarkWare, we’re waiting for the early-January management meeting that will frame Starknet’s main focus for 2026. If I had to guess the headline goals:

• $2B in BTC assets on Starknet.
• Shipping the BTCFi + privacy product and driving real traction to it (targeting early Q2 2026).
• 10k BTC staked and 35%+ STRK staked.
• Finally reaching meaningful chain revenue, with clearer value accrual for STRK and stronger app alignment across the ecosystem

Conclusion

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that Starknet is no longer a theoretical bet. It’s a stack that can handle massive usage, keep strengthening its fundamentals, and deepen real adoption, from advanced trading to BTCFi, from invisible wallets to consumer apps, all the way to the first serious building blocks of privacy.

And 2026 looks like the next logical step: stronger economic alignment around STRK, more revenue, and mechanisms that connect network activity to the token, while continuing to accelerate the Phase 4 roadmap; Alpen’s trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge, block time pushing toward sub-1s, EchoNet, staking v3, and steady progress toward full decentralization…

Most importantly, the narrative is coherent: Starknet wants to be the place where Bitcoin can finally be productive without compromising its standards, where privacy becomes a scalable primitive, and where consumer apps can onboard users without friction. If 2025 was the year of the foundation, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of traction and scale.

If you love Starknet and want to make sure you never miss an update on the evolution of our ecosystem, be sure to follow the entire Starknet ecosystem crew here.

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This article was also published on Lyskey’s blog.