Welcome to the 28th edition of my monthly recap, where I bring you the most important updates and developments from the Starknet ecosystem!

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📣 Important news of the month

🔷 S-two, StarkWare’s next-gen prover, now live on Starknet Mainnet

StarkWare has officially deployed S-two on Starknet Mainnet, delivering up to 100x efficiency gains over Stone, the previous Starknet prover. T

his upgrade marks a major turning point not only for Starknet, but for every chain built on the SN Stack. S-two will soon power Paradex and the entire StarkEx ecosystem, bringing massive performance improvements to anyone using Starknet technology.

Notably, S-two will unlock:

  • Client-side proving, essential for a wide range of privacy use cases such as private DeFi, zk-ID, verifiable AI, and more.
  • Decentralized proving, enabling anyone to participate in sequencing and proof generation, removing single points of failure.

And beyond outperforming Stone, S-two also beats other leading ZK VMs by up to 28x, making it a major selling point for teams considering the SN Stack.

🔷 Interoperability: Starknet’s biggest pain point is getting fixed, for good

Throughout 2024, one of the recurring criticisms was Starknet’s limited set of bridges and integrations, making it harder for users to move assets between chains.

That era is ending.

In 2025 alone, eight new interoperability solutions have landed, and the biggest ones are arriving in the coming days and weeks:

  • Native USDC & CCTP, bringing a far better stablecoin UX and smoother institutional onboarding
  • LayerZero + Stargate, connecting Starknet to over 150 chains
  • Near Intents, the system behind ZEC’s recent explosion, enabling STRK swaps with every chain and assets plugged into their network

Together, these integrations close the interoperability gap and make Starknet a first-class citizen in the multichain economy.

🔷 The Bitcoin economy on Starknet keeps expanding

Two months ago, Starknet launched BTCFi initiatives to establish the network as the safest, most capable environment for Bitcoiners to go beyond simple HODLing; by staking, trading, lending, borrowing, minting stablecoins, and more.

To support this growing ecosystem:

On top of that, Anchorage Digital now supports staking for both STRK and BTC, giving institutions a trusted custody gateway to join the ecosystem, a major unlock for institution adoption on Starknet..

🔷 Privacy on Starknet

STARK proofs, the ZK tech powering Starknet, are ideally suited for two domains:

  • Scalability
  • Privacy

Starknet has solved the first, and capacity will only improve from here. Now the focus is shifting toward privacy at scale, and the last month has been full of initiatives, some public, some not yet, but all pointing in the same direction.

The most important ones:

  • Ztarknet, a proposal to the Zcash community for building a Starknet-style L2 on top of Zcash.
  • zart/peace, the competitive onchain art canvas, now live on the Ztarknet test environment
  • Participation in the Zypherpunk Hackathon, with a dedicated $35k prize pool for Starknet builders. Here’s a workshop to get started with it.
  • The launch of Zoro, StarkWare’s exploration project for a STARK-proven Zcash light client, aiming to compress Zcash validation into succinct, verifiable proofs.

If you want a full deep dive into Starknet’s vision with Zcash, this article explains everything.

And this effort isn’t limited to Zcash. The StarkWare exploration team has also proposed a new NUT specification to integrate ZK programs into Cashu, enabling deeper privacy innovation on Bitcoin via ZK proofs.

Overall, more privacy projects, protocols, and use cases are coming, with some early hints already shared here.

🔷 Starknet is already 4 years old 👶

A quick reminder: Starknet has been live since 2021, and its underlying tech has been powering production systems since 2020 through StarkEx.

This is why we say Starknet has the most battle-tested ZK technology in the market. Here are some metrics since we have started to scale blockchains:

  • $1.5 trillion in volume
  • 1 billion transactions

Four years in, and decades more to come.

Starknet is already 4 years old

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📢 Starknet Ecosystem Update

🔷 Xverse is now fully integrated into the Starknet Ecosystem

Both the browser extension and mobile wallet from Xverse are now live across all Starknet apps.

This means every Xverse user can finally explore the full spectrum of Starknet use cases: BTCFi, trading, yield strategies, gaming, payments… everything.

🔷 Anyone can now build (and earn fees) on top of Extended

Extended’s builder codes are now live.

Developers can 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 will access far more than just Perp trading; new strategies, new interfaces, new products

🔷 Cartridge Controller continues its expansion into DeFi

Originally a gaming-focused wallet, Cartridge Controller is now integrating across DeFi:

The wallet is steadily evolving into a universal Starknet gateway, not just for gaming, but for finance as well.

🔷 Paradex Chain upgrade & Airdrop for top users

Paradex has integrated the Grinta upgrade into its chain, bringing:

  • A brand new mempool
  • Decentralized sequencer architecture
  • Sub-second transaction speeds
  • Several additional performance improvements

This upgrade went live on Starknet in September and has now proven stable enough for Paradex to adopt.

This is the power of the Starknet Stack: projects building with it automatically enjoy the best ZK stack on the market and ecosystem-level optimizations. Just build with us.

Paradex also airdropped 930 Badger Boxes to the top XP holders. Each box contains NFT from the Money Badger collection, the cultural engine behind the upcoming DIME token economy.

🔷 Uncap Finance joins BTCFi Season

Uncap users are now eligible for BTCFi Season incentives:

  • Depositing BTC on Uncap earns boosted STRK rewards yield
  • Borrowing USDU becomes much cheaper thanks to STRK interest rebates

This makes Uncap one of the most capital-efficient places to borrow stablecoins against Bitcoin.

🔷 Builder mixed news

A few noteworthy updates for devs:

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Metrics growth 💹

Apps

Staking

And the growth is explosive:

  • STRK staking: +25% in one month, +110% over a quarter
  • BTC staking: +130% in one month

Starknet Overall

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  • Starknet is now the #1 Bitcoin L2 by market share with 69% mindshare

Starknet is now the #1 Bitcoin L2 by market share with 69% mindshare

  • #2 ZK project by mindshare.

#2 ZK project by mindshare.

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Alpha Zone 💅

Five new projects launched on Starknet Mainnet this month:

  • Numo, vaults rebalancing for BTC yields
  • Nomina, a project allowing delta-neutral strategies across Extended + Hyperliquid + Lighter
  • Tubbly, a mobile app rewarding users for visiting specific physical locations
  • Shift Protocol, delta-neutral vaults built on top of Extended & Paradex, fully tokenized
  • Dope World, their full migration to Starknet is now completed, all assets bridgeable and usable on Starknet

And five new projects currently building:

  • Yield Stark, Bitcoin yield optimizer
  • Starknet-x402, payment protocol based on the x402 standard
  • Etheracts, new NFT collection
  • Everyday, consumer app rewarding daily habits
  • Grug Lair, building a new project: a participation layer for global sports, fully onchain

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This article was also publishes on Lyskey’s blog.