Starknet is in a crisis of trust due to frequent CEO changes

Author: flowie, ChainCatcher

Last week, the Starknet Foundation announced the replacement of its CEO. Diego Oliva, who has served as the CEO of the Starknet Foundation since March 2023, resigned and James Strudwick, who is responsible for the growth of the Starknet ecosystem, took over.

This is not the first time that the Starknet team has changed important senior executives this year. In January, Uri Kolodny, CEO of StarkWare, a Starknet developer, posted on the X platform that he had resigned as CEO due to family health reasons, and the CEO position was taken over by Eli Ben-Sasson, another co-founder and president of StarkWare.

Since being criticized by the community for airdrop distribution issues at the beginning of the year, the controversy faced by Starknet has not stopped. Recently, ZKX, the leading derivatives protocol in Starknet's ecosystem, announced its closure less than two months after TGE. Amid the criticism of investors, members of the Starknet Foundation also suffered dissatisfaction for defending ZKX.

Frequent changes of CEOs, coupled with Starknet's "inaction" after causing multiple public opinion crises, it is difficult not to let community users question the operation of the organization behind it.

After the controversy, has the replacement of CEO become inertia?

Faced with community disputes, the rapid replacement of CEOs seems to have become Starknet's inertial operation.

On December 1 last year, Starknet officially announced the airdrop, which caused dissatisfaction in the community. Many ordinary users questioned that Starknet's airdrop rules favored developers and ignored the interests of ordinary users.

After the airdrop controversy lasted for 1 month, Uri Kolodny, CEO of Starknet developer StarkWare, suddenly announced his resignation as CEO due to family health reasons.

StarkWare has four core founders: Uri Kolodny, Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa and Michael Riabzev.

Among them, Uri Kolodny, who resigned as CEO, has a business and capital background, while the rest have a technical background. Uri Kolodny is a serial entrepreneur and has been the co-founder and CEO of Mondria Technologies Ltd, Timna and other companies.

Eli Ben-Sasson, who took over as CEO, is a cryptography scientist and the creator of the key technical standard zk-STARK. He and Alessandro Chiesa, another core member of StarkWare, were both founding scientists of Electric Coin Company (also known as Zcash Co).

With the airdrop controversy still unsettled, the CEO's departure has also triggered speculation among community users about whether there are internal conflicts in his team. Some users believe that Uri Kolodny's reason for resigning as CEO due to family health problems is too far-fetched. And after Uri announced his resignation as CEO, Eli Ben-Sasson, who succeeded him, did not express condolences, which may further confirm the speculation of internal conflicts.

Only half a year after the replacement of StarkWare CEO, Starknet staged the same drama again after facing controversy over the shutdown of the ecological head derivatives protocol ZKX. Diego Oliva, CEO of Starknet Foundation, resigned and was replaced by James Strudwick, head of ecological growth.

Diego Oliva served as CEO of Starknet Foundation for just over a year. Before joining Starknet, Diego Oliva served as Facebook's regional director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, responsible for growth in these regions.

Starknet did not explain the reason for Diego Oliva's departure, but only stated that the team structure of the Starknet Foundation has been initially established and it is time to hand over the leadership team.

The official blog of Starknet mentioned that during Diego Oliva's tenure, the Starknet Foundation has grown from a team of two part-time employees to the current size of more than 30 people; and launched multiple ecological programs such as DeFi Spring, Seed Grants, and Catalyst and Propulsion programs, and cooperated with more than 100 infrastructure teams.

James, who took over as CEO, has only been in the Starknet Foundation for about half a year, and has mainly promoted the work of DeFi, L1 and L2 expansion projects.

Although community users have expectations for the frequent changes of CEOs, there seem to be more voices of pessimism. Twitter user @ Timmy _ Turnes said, "I feel like I will go to a new low..."

@TheJinKang believes that Starknet is facing a crisis of trust. He said that after the ecological project ZKX was shut down, neither the Starknet Foundation nor the CEO came forward to respond officially. The change of CEO at this time shows that the organization's operating conditions are very bad.

And @wholisticguy questioned that the new CEO of the foundation, as a former ecological director, had only more than 400 followers on the X account (which increased to more than 900 after the announcement of the appointment of CEO).

@wholisticguy said: "As one of the most technically capable L2 teams, cultivating Twitter followers should be like fishing in a barrel. You are not required to have 100,000 followers, but only a few hundred followers indicate a lack of engagement."

Starknet has repeatedly created public opinion crises

Replacing the CEO may also be Starknet's self-rescue after facing a downturn in development and public opinion crises.

Starknet, which has advantages in technical strength and Vitalik's participation in investment, seems to be particularly Buddhist in its marketing and public relations attitude.

Whether it is the airdrop controversy or the closure of the ecological project ZKX, Starknet has rarely done anything in the face of the continued fermentation of community emotions, and team members have repeatedly made some inappropriate remarks that have triggered new public opinion controversies and trust crises.

In January this year, Starknet was frequently rumored to have airdropped but it has not landed yet, and the community users who were already emotional were "ridiculed" by the official Starknet.

Starknet core member Abdelhamid Bakhta openly called community users who asked about the airdrop status "e-beggars" on social media. In addition, Starknet also added a sub-channel of "e-beggars" in the official Discord channel, which aroused the anger of the community.

Although Abdelhamid and the official channel of Starknet urgently deleted the remarks and apologized after the public opinion fermented. But Abdelhamid and Starknet CEO Eli Ben-Sasson were still attacked by online language for a long time.

Currently, the comment area of ​​Starknet's official social media is still full of sarcastic remarks of "e-beggar chain".

Although the statement that "Starknet has only 8 daily active users" that was widely circulated since April was later confirmed to be a misunderstanding, many crypto users still believe that this is the true situation of Starknet.

Recently, a similar public relations disaster happened again. ZKX, the leading derivatives protocol of Starknet, announced its closure six weeks after TGE, which triggered ZKX investors to attack it and call it a scam, demanding that StarkNet and the exchanges listed on it reveal the truth.

Starknet did not respond to this, and Henri, a member of the Starknet Foundation, defended ZKX, saying, "ZKX has been contributing to the ecosystem for many years... It is totally wrong to call them scammers because of some wrong decisions (I am not defending this). This will have a negative impact on you and your judgment."

The seemingly inappropriate remarks of the members of the Starknet Foundation also aroused users' dissatisfaction again, and Starknet was ridiculed for having only single-digit daily active users.

The attack on ZKX also rose to the question of the status of the Starknet ecological network. Many community users said that the lack of activity of the Starknet ecological network was the key reason why the ZKX team could not continue even if it received financing.

According to Artemis data, compared with multiple layer2s such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync, Starknet currently ranks last in terms of daily active users, daily transaction volume, DEX intraday transaction volume, and daily captured transaction fees. And while many layer2s are generating positive profits, Starknet is still not profitable.

Expanding the BTC ecosystem narrative, is Starknet still worth looking forward to?

After Starknet was caught in a public opinion crisis and the network activity and coin price plummeted, @cryptonerdcn, a developer on the Starknet ecosystem, has lowered its expectations for Starknet.

But @cryptonerdcn said it would not be too pessimistic. Judging from the hackathon that Starknet participated in in June, the activity of its ecosystem developers is not as bleak as expected.

@cryptonerdcn mentioned that after the price of the currency plummeted, it was originally thought that there would not be many users participating, but in the end it was estimated that at least 75 teams participated. "You know, because the Cairo language used by Starknet, compared to Solidity, there are very few people who understand it (I remember only a few dozen), and compared to the EVM system, which can take all kinds of re-shelled things to participate in the competition, many projects in this hackathon are completely started from scratch."

In the view of @cryptonerdcn, if Starknet can make up for its shortcomings in marketing and other aspects, at least it will not become "dead".

From the recent developments of Starknet, continuous technical upgrades are still the top priority. According to the Starknet community's release of v0.13.2 and the summer roadmap, the v0.13.2 version to be launched in August will reduce the block time without increasing the L1 cost, with the goal of shortening the transaction confirmation time to an average of about 2 seconds.

In October and November, v0.13.3 was launched. The essential content of this version is Cairo-native, which emphasizes that faster execution will further shorten the confirmation time.

However, Ethereum Layer2 is too volatile. Relying on volume TPS and low fees alone can no longer bring new growth expectations.

If the subsequent Ethereum Layer2 narrative remains sluggish, @cryptonerdcn looks forward to Starknet's narrative space in the BTC ecosystem.

In June this year, Starknet announced that it would become the first network to settle on both Bitcoin and Ethereum and expand Bitcoin to thousands of transactions per second. This will be achieved within six months after Bitcoin's potential upgrade to OP_CAT.

Crypto analyst Haotian said that although Starknet's layout of the Bitcoin ecosystem faces too many challenges and uncertainties in technology. "But once the narrative constraints of (Ethereum) layer2 are broken, Starknet's imagination will be very different."

In Haotian's view, if Starknet is extended to the application scenarios of the Bitcoin ecosystem, its ZK technology base, parallel transactions, Cario language and other original high-performance foundations will become its core advantages that distinguish it from other Layer2.