stark

According to The Block, Josh Stark, a key figure at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), announced his resignation after five years and will officially step down at the end of the month. Stark joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2019, initially working in the special projects team, and later rose to leadership, collaborating with EF Chair Aya Miyaguchi, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, and co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Bastian Aue.He is one of the most prominent members of the foundation's external image and has led several significant advancements in Ethereum, including the "The Merge" upgrade that transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake, as well as subsequent upgrades like Dencun, Fusaka, and Pectra. During last year's leadership adjustments at the foundation, he was appointed as the "co-manager" of the EF board and recently took on the role of co-chair of the "trillion-dollar security" initiative.Last month, Stark co-authored a strategic blog post on Ethereum with Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma, outlining Ethereum's latest scaling direction and its relationship with the Layer 2 ecosystem. Stark stated, "I haven't planned for the future yet; I just want to take a good rest and spend time with family and friends." This resignation occurs against the backdrop of ongoing changes at the Ethereum Foundation.Last year, the foundation underwent significant leadership adjustments, refocusing its strategic priorities on scaling the Ethereum mainnet and core cypherpunk values; Tomasz K. Stańczak also resigned from his co-executive director position at the end of February this year, having served for less than a year. On the same day, Trent Van Epps also announced his departure from EF to fully dedicate himself to Protocol Guild, the independent funding organization for Ethereum core developers that he founded.

According to The Block, zero-knowledge proof scaling developer StarkWare announced layoffs and initiated an internal restructuring. Co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson stated in an all-hands meeting that the company is "overly large" and needs to return to a "startup mode" to accelerate product-market fit. The specific number of layoffs and the timeline have not yet been disclosed, but the company promises to provide severance compensation that exceeds legal requirements.After the restructuring, StarkWare will split into two independent business units: one is a revenue-oriented application department led by current CPO Avihu Levy, focusing on developing monetizable products on its own technology stack; the other is the Starknet development department led by current product head Tom Brand. Each unit will have its own engineering, product, and marketing teams.Strategically, StarkWare plans to fully control the complete blockchain proof technology stack, including Cairo, Sierra, and quantum-resistant STARK cryptography, reducing reliance on external Layer 1 blockchains and application teams. Ben-Sasson stated that the company will shift from "doing many things well" to "doing a few things excellently," focusing on high-potential, high-value directions that only StarkWare can achieve. Additionally, COO Oren Katz has applied for resignation and will officially leave at the end of April.

According to official news, the Starknet mainnet will undergo a scheduled upgrade starting at 17:10 (UTC+8), with an expected downtime of about 12 minutes.Starknet stated that this upgrade is part of Starknet's move towards further decentralization, which will transfer the block hash calculation of Starknet blocks to decentralized Apollo nodes.

According to The Block, Starknet is developing a new privacy feature aimed at enabling teams to issue protected stablecoins and other assets while maintaining compliance.This feature is called the STRK20 framework, developed by StarkWare, and is expected to be deployed on Starknet later this year.The framework is designed to provide token-level privacy protection for assets issued on Starknet, keeping transactions and balances confidential while being compatible with decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. According to the team, Starknet's solution is expected to support ERC-20 tokens—the standard used by most fungible assets on Ethereum.

The Ethereum Layer 2 network Starknet, developed by StarkWare, announced the launch of a new type of asset based on Bitcoin, strkBTC, which supports balance shielding and private transfers while maintaining full composability in decentralized finance applications.It is reported that strkBTC allows Bitcoin holders to interact on Starknet DeFi while keeping transaction amounts and counterparties private. The system will deterministically issue strkBTC based on verifiable Bitcoin deposits, avoiding arbitrary control during the issuance process.

According to the official blog, Starknet has announced the launch of a new type of wrapped asset, strkBTC, aimed at providing optional privacy protection features for Bitcoin. strkBTC is an asset issued on Starknet that can be exchanged bi-directionally for native Bitcoin, designed to address the financial privacy leakage issues caused by the transparency of the Bitcoin ledger.strkBTC supports two modes: in "non-shielded mode," it operates as a standard ERC-20 token, with balances and transfers publicly verifiable; in "shielded mode," asset balances and transaction details will be hidden. This privacy mechanism is designed based on pragmatism, defaulting to confidentiality for the public, but supporting compliance audits through a Viewing Key to ensure it can operate in regulated environments. With strkBTC, users can participate in DeFi collateralization or settlement without exposing their positions and strategies. Starknet states that strkBTC will be officially launched soon and will gradually expand its privacy features in the future.

StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson spoke on X about the potential impact of quantum computing on the crypto industry, calling for a proactive deployment of post-quantum security upgrades across multi-chain ecosystems, including Bitcoin, and proposed a five-step action plan:Acknowledge the threat and clearly recognize that once quantum computers mature, they will pose a severe challenge to the existing public key cryptography system, and take decisive action to implement countermeasures.Enhance education and information dissemination, systematically learn about the current state of quantum computing development and feasible solutions in post-quantum cryptography (PQC), and spread relevant knowledge within the community to raise overall awareness.Organize and invest resources to support and collaborate with post-quantum cryptography experts, promote multiple research and engineering practices, and provide funding and community initiative support for related projects.Listen to expert advice and establish standards, with experts proposing specific technical routes, including the selection of new signature algorithm standards and the reasonable post-quantum security levels required for hash functions.Promote protocol and infrastructure upgrades, introduce new quantum-resistant signature mechanisms at the core protocol layer, and ensure compatibility and integration with key infrastructures such as wallets to ensure a smooth transition.

StarkWare posted on the X platform that the zero-knowledge privacy protocol Nightfall developed by Ernst & Young has been deployed on Starknet.

StarkNet announced that its native token STRK has been launched on Solana through the NEAR Intents cross-chain solution, allowing users to receive STRK directly in their Solana wallets without the need for traditional bridging processes.NEAR Intents utilizes a solver execution model, where users only need to specify the outcome, and the execution process is handled automatically in the background. STRK will be traded on the Solana DEX Jupiter, with Meteora serving as the primary liquidity venue. Notably, this collaboration comes after the official Solana account mocked Starknet for having only 8 daily active users.

Solana's Head of Growth for Asia Pacific, Yaoyao, posted on the X platform that before joining Solana, in 2023, they attended a Starknet event and tried to discuss expansion plans for the Asia Pacific region with the team. During a conversation with a Starknet executive, the executive displayed arrogance, stating that Yaoyao's inquiry about the reasons and ways to join the company was very rude.Yaoyao mentioned that they were still working at Bybit at the time and were also undergoing interviews with Solana, and this experience ultimately led to their decision to join Solana. Yaoyao also stated that the ecosystem is defined by people, and if one does not stand with the community, there will be no support.

The official Solana account posted on the X platform, stating that the Starknet token STRK has been launched on the Solana network through Near.

Regarding Solana's mockery of Starknet with "only 8 daily active users and just 10 daily transactions," and Starknet's subsequent response, "Who told this little brother Solana the data?" He Yi responded on social media, stating: "Take a deep breath and relax, we are all friends, and harmony is precious."He Yi also added "peanuts, sunflower seeds, and mineral water," calling for the outside world to view the related discussions with a more relaxed mindset, avoiding excessive controversy due to on-chain data comparisons.

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

The Ethereum L2 network Starknet released an analysis report on the short-term mainnet outage that occurred this Monday, stating that the cause of the incident was the inconsistency between the execution layer (blockifier) and the proof layer: under specific cross-function calls and rollback combinations, the execution layer incorrectly recorded a state write that had been rolled back, leading to abnormal transaction execution. The related transactions did not receive L1 finality confirmation. This incident triggered a block reorganization, with approximately 18 minutes of on-chain activity being rolled back.This is the second major interruption since 2025, following a September incident where a sequencer vulnerability caused an outage of over 5 hours and rolled back about 1 hour of on-chain activity.

According to official news, Starknet has resumed online operations and is fully operational.Transactions submitted between 9:24 AM and 9:42 AM UTC may not have been processed correctly. A retrospective report will be released later, which will include a complete timeline of events, root cause analysis, and long-term preventive measures.

Starknet posted on the X platform that Starknet is currently experiencing downtime, and the team is actively investigating the issue and working hard to restore all functions as soon as possible.

Ethereum L2 network Starknet announced on platform X that the latest version v0.14.1 will be deployed to the Starknet mainnet in a few hours. As part of this upgrade, the Starknet network is expected to undergo a brief maintenance downtime around 08:30 UTC (16:30 Beijing time), during which transactions on the mainnet will not be processed.It is reported that this version will support faster block closures during low activity periods and will deploy the BLAKE hash function (SNIP-34).

According to GlobeNewswire, Intercont (Cayman) Limited (NASDAQ: NCT) announced the signing of a letter of intent to acquire a minority stake of less than 50% in Singapore's Web3 technology company Starks Network Ltd, and to jointly promote the development of the zCloakNetwork project, officially advancing the layout of on-chain digital asset infrastructure.The zCloak Network's business covers AI digital identity, enterprise-level self-custody wallets, stablecoin payments, and AI encryption payment technology, and has received investments from institutions such as Coinbase Ventures. The two parties will collaborate to apply Web3 technology to the digital transformation of payment and business processes in shipping and trade, accelerating the intelligent upgrade of the industry.As global stablecoin payment volumes are expected to surpass the combined total of Visa and Mastercard for the first time in 2024, the demand for compliant, secure, and scalable wallet infrastructure continues to grow among institutions. NCT stated that this acquisition is an important step in promoting the group's long-term strategy and exploring cross-industry layouts.NCT and Starks' leaders stated that this cooperation symbolizes "the Venetian merchants setting sail again on the blockchain." The two parties will jointly promote the implementation of enterprise-level Web3 technology in the global shipping and trade sectors.