StarkWare is restructuring into two enterprise models and chopping employees because it pivots from scaling Ethereum towards constructing revenue-generating merchandise of its personal — a shift compelled by a greater than 99% collapse in income on its flagship Starknet community.
The adjustments have been outlined throughout a company-wide city corridor hosted by CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, the place he instructed workers StarkWare would restructure into two impartial models and give attention to constructing revenue-generating merchandise in-house. A transcript of the deal with to employees was reviewed by CoinDesk.
Starknet chain income, which peaked close to $6 million in a single month in late 2023, stood at roughly $48,000 by means of the primary half of April 2026, in response to DefiLlama data. The decline is partly industry-wide, with Starknet’s rivals equally impacted, as Ethereum’s EIP-4844 improve in March 2024 slashed Layer 2 charge income throughout the board.
Whole Worth Locked (TVL), nonetheless, stays above $200 million.
Ben-Sasson instructed workers the corporate now must “take our technological superiority… and convert it into significant income, significant utilization,” signaling a shift away from a pure infrastructure focus towards constructing merchandise that may drive demand instantly.
He added that StarkWare would prioritize constructing “issues that may be finished by no different group, in no different means,” focusing sources on merchandise with “immense potential income” slightly than broad experimentation.
“I began on this discipline in 2013, virtually 13 years in the past, and I’ve seen fairly quite a few winters,” Ben-Sasson mentioned on the city corridor. “I feel what marks this winter is that there is a very clear vacuum in management throughout blockchain, and it impacts even issues like Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
The corporate will spin up a brand new revenue-focused Purposes unit led by researcher Avihu Levy.
Levy’s promotion comes days after he revealed a paper outlining Quantum Safe Bitcoinor QSB, a technique for making bitcoin transactions immune to quantum assaults with out requiring adjustments to the protocol.
The method replaces conventional signature schemes with hash-based proofs however comes with important tradeoffs, requiring intensive off-chain computation and costing an estimated $75 to $200 per transaction, versus roughly $0.33 for the standard bitcoin cost.
QSB affords an alternative to BIP-360a long-pending proposal so as to add quantum resistance to Bitcoin on the protocol stage that was merged to Bitcoin’s enchancment proposal repository in February however might take years to activate.
Ben-Sasson didn’t identify Bitcoin or quantum security because the Purposes unit’s goal, saying solely that StarkWare would give attention to merchandise “that can’t be finished by any of our rivals” and construct with “minimal dependencies on exterior L1s or exterior software groups.”
Extra particulars, he instructed employees, would come subsequent week.
A spokesperson for StarkWare declined a request to remark.
