Starknet Activity Surges On Token Speculation

Starknet is becoming a major contender within Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem, consistently ranking as the second most active L2 by transaction volume this week.

Starknet posted record-high throughput of 9 transactions per second (TPS) on Sep. 3, according to L2beat. Activity trended up after Braavos, a Starknet wallet provider, published and then quickly deleted an article last week revealing that Starknet’s long-awaited STRK token will soon be available to the public.

Speedy social media users shared screenshots showing a preview of Braavos’ post, titled “Why STRK will be Different from Other Tokens.”

Starknet also ranked as a top five Ethereum protocol by burn rate over the past seven days, driving the permanent destruction of 415 ETH, according to Ultra Sound Money.

Layer 2 Race Heats Up

Starknet’s rising activity comes as competition is heating up among Ethereum Layer 2s.

While Arbitrum and Optimism dominated L2 activity in 2022, zkSync Era launched the first-ever zkEVM — an Ethereum-compatible rollup secured by zero-knowledge proofs — in March of this year, shortly followed by Polygon zkEVM that same month, and Linea from Consensys last month.

zkSync Era has emerged as the most active L2 with 29.1M transactions processed in the past 30 days, closely rivaling Ethereum mainnet, which processed 30.6M over the same period. Era also ranks as the third-largest L2 with a total value locked (TVL) of $389M.

Base, the OP Stack-based Layer 2 from Coinbase, ranks fourth by TVL with $383M just one month after completing its general access launch. Base also briefly overtook Era by throughput two weeks ago amid the initial frenzy surrounding social trading app Friend Tech, posting a record high of nearly 16 TPS on Aug. 21.

Although Base’s throughput has trended around 4 TPS over the past week, when coupled with its Superchain sister network, Optimism, the two chains would rank second among L2s.

However, Arbitrum and Optimism still make up 80% of Layer 2 TVL with $5.2B and $2.5B respectively.

Starknet Embraces Open Source

On Sept. 6, Starknet announced that its entire tech stack is now open-source after shipping version 0.12.2 to mainnet a day earlier.

Starknet open-sourced its prover, the network’s core engine, on Sept. 1. The move appeared to be further evidence that a Starknet token could be imminent, with a February blog post from the team stating its prover would be open-sourced “right before Starknet will be ready for full decentralization.”