Starknet (STRK)
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Historical price evolution of Starknet
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Starknet has its origins in StarkWare Industries, a company founded in 2018 in Israel by Eli Ben-Sasson—professor of computer science at Technion, co-inventor of STARK proofs and co-founder of Zcash, the first crypto project in production based on ZK technology—, Uri Kolodny—Israeli technology entrepreneur—and other cryptography researchers. The foundational premise established that STARK proofs allow verification of off-chain computation in a mathematically inviolable manner and without the need for a "trusted setup", unlike zk-SNARKs.
In 2019, StarkWare deployed STARK verifiers on Ethereum mainnet and completed its first funding rounds: a seed round of 6 million dollars and a Series A of 30 million dollars led by Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures. Additionally, the company received a 12 million dollar grant from the Ethereum Foundation.
Development continued with the launch of StarkEx in June 2020, a permissioned ZK scaling solution for specific applications that was deployed on Ethereum mainnet. Early clients included dYdX for derivatives, Immutable X for NFTs, Sorare and DeversiFi. This platform managed to accumulate more than 1 trillion dollars in trading volume and 570 million transactions. In November 2021, StarkWare published Starknet's genesis block, the permissionless and decentralised version of the protocol, coinciding with a Series C of 50 million dollars led by Sequoia Capital.
The complete launch of Starknet as a permissionless L2 network occurred in February 2022, allowing any developer to deploy contracts using Cairo, StarkWare's own programming language specifically designed to generate STARK proofs. In May 2022, the company completed a Series D of 100 million dollars, reaching a valuation of 8,000 million dollars—the highest ever recorded for an L2 scaling project—and a total raised of 273 million dollars. The STRK token was deployed on Ethereum mainnet in November 2022, although without immediate public distribution.
The evolution towards public tokenisation materialised in February 2024 with the public launch of the STRK token and a retroactive airdrop called "Provisions" targeted at users, builders, Ethereum contributors and stakers. In November 2024, Phase 1 of STRK staking was implemented, making Starknet the first rollup in production with a permissionless staking system on L2. In 2025, the Grinta update (v0.14.0) established Starknet as the first rollup in production with decentralised sequencing through multiple sequencers, reducing block times from 30 seconds to 4 seconds and pre-confirmations to approximately 0.5 seconds, which allowed Starknet to reach Stage 1 decentralisation category according to L2Beat.
Starknet functions as a Layer 2 ZK-rollup on Ethereum that utilises STARK proofs to mathematically verify the validity of transactions processed off the main chain. Unlike optimistic rollups, which assume that transactions are valid and allow them to be disputed later, Starknet cryptographically demonstrates the correctness of each batch of transactions before publishing it on Ethereum, making it impossible for invalid data to be published. Its architecture is based on two main components: the Sequencers, which process and order transactions to propose new blocks, and the Provers, which generate the STARK proofs corresponding to each batch of transactions. These proofs are subsequently verified on Ethereum with an exponentially lower computational cost than re-executing all transactions individually.
Smart contracts on Starknet are developed using Cairo, a programming language specifically designed to generate STARK proofs efficiently. A distinctive feature of the platform is its native implementation of Account Abstraction, where all user accounts function as smart contracts. This design allows the implementation of custom logic for transaction authorisation, social account recovery systems and the payment of fees using any compatible token. The native token STRK fulfils three main functions within the ecosystem: it serves as a payment method for transaction fees, allows participation in the consensus mechanism through staking and grants voting rights in protocol governance decisions. The total supply of STRK is fixed at 10,000 million tokens.
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