Solana publicly mocks Starknet's market value, questioned for citing outdated data

Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher

Last night, the official Solana X account posted, "Starknet currently has only 8 daily active users and a daily transaction volume of just 10, yet its market cap still reaches 1 billion dollars, with a fully diluted valuation (FDV) as high as 15 billion dollars."

The tweet quickly sparked heated discussions in the market, attracting responses from several industry figures, including Bubblemaps, MegaETH, and Pump.fun co-founder Alon Cohen. Many users began to question, "With 8 daily active users, 10 transactions, and a 1 billion dollar market cap, how does Starknet explain this?"

The tweet also prompted a personal reply from StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, stating, "Solana has 8 marketing interns who maintain a high market cap by tweeting 10 times a day." Solana co-founder Toly humorously responded, "This is an unnecessary violent conflict between bald CEOs."

But is Starknet's activity really as dismal as Solana claims? These figures even led some users to criticize it as "looking more like an inactive testnet rather than an active blockchain with a billion-dollar market cap."

Starknet has experienced over a year of decline, but several metrics have significantly rebounded

According to DeFiLlama data, Starknet's TVL has now climbed to 302 million dollars, marking its first return to the 300 million dollar level since 2024, emerging from the lows at that time. The market cap of stablecoins on the network has also risen to approximately 248 million dollars, setting a new historical high, with the growth of stablecoin market cap often seen as a key indicator of deepening DeFi participation.

Additionally, according to Token Terminal data, Starknet currently has an average of about 65,000 daily active users, far exceeding Solana's claim of "8 daily active users."

In the past, Starknet faced a decline for over a year due to weak Layer 2 market sentiment and reduced on-chain activity. However, various data now highlight Starknet's recovery, even though it still remains far below its historical peak and has not yet entered the top tier in the fierce Layer 2 competition. Starknet's overall performance still lags behind leading Layer 2 networks like Base and Arbitrum, but recovering to the 300 million dollar level represents a significant capital strength over the past year.

However, Starknet also faces technical challenges during its recovery process. Last week, the network experienced a brief mainnet outage, and the official post-incident analysis report indicated that the cause was a state inconsistency between the execution layer and the proof layer, leading to abnormal transaction execution. This marks the second major interruption since 2025, with a previous outage in September due to a sequencer bug that caused over 5 hours of downtime. Major technical failures have become an important issue that Starknet needs to overcome in its competition with other Layer 2 networks.

According to recent news, Starknet is actively building the BTCFi ecosystem. Re7 Labs, managing 1 billion dollars in assets, has been operating structured BTC yield strategies on Starknet, and institutional custodian Anchorage Digital has also added Bitcoin staking support. Furthermore, Starknet introduced network upgrades and staking features by the end of 2024, significantly reducing gas costs. In less than eight weeks, over 115 million dollars worth of BTC has been staked on the network.

Where did Solana's cited data come from?

The official Solana tweet actually referenced outdated data from two years ago. Starknet experienced a mass exodus of users after its airdrop on February 20, 2024, with daily active users plummeting by 80-90% from 380,000 on the day of the airdrop to around 20,000 by mid-April. A large number of airdrop hunters exited after receiving their tokens, coupled with controversies over airdrop eligibility rules, leading to extremely negative community sentiment, with every Starknet tweet being tagged as "#scamnet."

In this context, someone jokingly exaggerated that Starknet was left with "only 8 daily active users" to mock the network's desolation. This data is now outdated, and Solana's revival of this information has been questioned by the market as deliberate hype.

In response to Solana's tweet data, Starknet's official account also released a gorilla emoji image to counter, asking, "Who told them this data?" Solana co-founder Toly commented on the controversy, saying, "We need to fire the interns."

Regarding Solana's mockery of Starknet and Starknet's subsequent response, Binance co-CEO He Yi responded on X, stating, "Take a deep breath and relax, we are all friends, let's prioritize harmony," calling for a more relaxed attitude towards related discussions and avoiding excessive controversy due to on-chain data comparisons.

From being mocked by users for having "only 8 users" to now having 65,000 daily active users and a TVL of 300 million dollars, Starknet is struggling to emerge from the shadow of the mass exodus in 2024. The BTCFi ecosystem layout, institutional-grade custody, and yield strategies have added momentum to its recovery; however, significant technical failures and revenue from fees far below leading networks like Arbitrum also create uncertainty for future development. To truly enter the top tier of Layer 2, technical stability and ecosystem depth remain unavoidable tests.