Starknet monthly recap #9: March

Welcome to the 9th edition of my monthly recap, where I bring you the most important updates and developments from the Starknet ecosystem.

📣 Important news of the month

🔹 _{EIP4844 Integration: A Leap Towards Cost Efficiency}

Blobs have finally arrived, bringing with them a drastic reduction of gas fees for users. Notably, users on Starknet now enjoy a fee reduction of over 90%!

This is just the beginning of StarkWare’s commitment to making Starknet more accessible to everyone; 4 other initiatives will be put in place to further reduce these fees.

🔹 Roadmap 2024

Speaking of fee reduction plans, StarkWare’s vision for 2024 is crystal clear: destroy gas fees for users and significantly increase throughput. This will be achieved through two major developments: Volition and Transaction Parallelization.

🔹 The Faster Prover in the market is coming

StarkWare has introduced its next-generation prover, Stwo, allowing for significant optimizations, specifically in proving speed. As a result, transactions will be faster and more cost-effective under this new prover. Stwo is expected to replace the current Stone prover when it's ready, likely around the end of this year or the beginning of 2025 👇

🔹 The Premature Death of Goerli

The Ethereum Goerli test network has now finished, implying that Goerli on Starknet has entered a non-maintenance phase. Developers still using this test network are strongly advised to migrate to Sepolia as soon as possible.

📢 What About the Ecosystem?

🔹 The Foundation Accelerates

The Foundation has announced the launch of its gaming committee. The goal of this committee is to analyze, strategize, and recommend programs to expand Starknet's gaming ecosystem. To do so, the committee will be given a budget of 50M STRK.

In addition to this committee, note that the DeFi committee launched its first on-chain campaign a few weeks ago. This campaign aims to distribute 40M STRK over six months to network users. The current wave, which is the third one, rewards Liquidity Providers of Money Markets and AMM. For an overview of the current APRs for this campaign, check out this great dashboard 👇️ 

Lastly, the Foundation has announced that it is addressing the distribution problems of Provision towards three sub-categories: Non-VeVe StarkEx users identified as VeVe users, VeVe users, and Pooled stakers. The Foundation is working to allow these groups to claim their STRK in April.

🔹 Paymaster

AVNU has launched its new feature: Paymaster, which allows users to pay their gas fees in USDC and USDT, along with ETH and STRK! Although it's currently only accessible to their top 5k users, it will soon be available to all users 👇️ 

🔹 ZEND airdrop

The month of March saw the launch of the zkLend token: ZEND! Notably, if you have used this money market, you are probably eligible for the following airdrop 👇️ 

🔹 Ekubo's Progress

Ekubo recently had its AMM audited by Nethermind and published the audit results. The project also announced it's developing a new feature, DCA (Dollar Cost Average), which will be launched very soon 👇️ 

🔹 New Projects on Mainnet and Testnet

This month, one new project was launched on Mainnet:

• Bountive, a no-loss prize savings protocol

Regarding testnet:

• Starkarcade, a new on-chain casino, is preparing for its testnet launch

• Realms, the gaming hub, launched the alpha of its L3

🔹 New Projects Alert:

• Gojo: a new Perp DEX on Starknet

• Vesu: a 100% permissionless Money Market (even for pool creation)

• Cairoaudit: a new company auditing Cairo contracts

• Goku Hub: the first DeFi hub and the first announced project from the Kakarot zkEVM ecosystem

📰 Some of the Best Content of the Month

🔹 Overview of the Starknet ecosystem

If you're seeking an overview of the entire Starknet ecosystem, here is a categorized map of all projects being built on Starknet, updated on March 4th 👇️ 

🔹 Kakarot Deep Dive

Kakarot is one of the most ambitious projects in the Starknet ecosystem. As it prepares for its public testnet release, now is a great time to delve further into the project and stay updated 👇️ 

🔹 Starknet and Opportunity

Starknet presents a wealth of opportunities for users. Before taking advantage of them, it's essential to first understand Starknet and the advantages it offers. Here is a great video explaining this, and presenting all current opportunities within its ecosystem 👇️ 

None of the content of this newsletter is financial advice. Always do your own research.

Thank you for reading, and see you in April for the next monthly recap. ⏳