Written by: Maxlion Source: X, @Real_Maxlion

This article aims to systematically analyze what is done in Starknet ecological strategies Wrong and doing the right thing will also explain why Starknet users, the collapse of coin prices and the prosperity of the developer community existed simultaneously in the past.

Because I use cells to record matrix strategies in the original text, the Twitter article will be relatively long, so I recommend everyone to read the original text of Feishu "Starknet Ecological Strategy Gains and Losses" 》.

https://mpfxyvfyzr.feishu.cn/docx/Ss0Rdwdg1oseJgx2OIYc7Marncd< /em>

Why write

In the past, I had a simple understanding of believing that technology and labor can bring long-term returns, but labor-intensiveness and technological advancement do not mean To gain the recognition of the user market, there are many other factors that determine the short-term and long-term success of a public chain. Especially in 24-25, Starknet's performance in on-chain ecology, market voice, user scale and token price was not disappointing or even shocking.

Starknet has never produced an application with user wealth effect, paradigm innovation and high user usage (full-chain games are still worth looking forward to), plus the token price drop Breaking the valuation and OTC 0.4u price (the latest price is 0.23u), and the weekly live address fell to 23k and daily live 4k. These phenomena and data have shown that there are big problems with Starknet's operations. In addition, I have participated in the growth of Starknet Chinese developer community and project ecosystem from 23 to 24 years. I realized that the understanding and operation methods of public chains should start from reality rather than live in ideals and are limited to development. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out some more comprehensive and detailed reflections on the ecological strategies of public chains.

https://tokenterminal.com/explorer/projects/starknet? v=NDA2NmU3MTkyYTRiMWZjODg1NjkxODM5

Record these thoughts because I still have a belief that gambling and PVP are the whole of blockchain/encryption , it is still necessary for us to think about the long-term public chain operation construction and how to organize various crypto classes/groups to work together for one goal with their own self-interest and other interests.

Get back to the topic. Although the above problems arise in the development of Starknet ecological, this does not mean that the development of Starknet is over. The Starknet ecosystem continues. The Starknet Foundation also frequently organizes developer activities around the world, such as the Middle East, Africa and Europe, provides ecological support for developers and teams, and launches various ecological funding; DOJO engines, full-chain games, and Kakarot are still developing; Starknet parent company StarkWare is also advancing the technology development of BTC ZK and trying to push BTC miners to accept OP_CAT for Bitcoin verifiable computing, making Starknet the world's first de facto ETH and BTC dual Layer2. But these are the stories of Starknet’s future.

I will analyze in this article why StarkWare and Starknet are the operators of Starknet The foundation’s success in technology infrastructure and developer communities has not brought about the prosperity of on-chain applications, the increase in users and TVL, what they did right and what they did wrong. However, this article is not a great work, and I am still collecting a lot of information on Starknet and other new public chains for thinking.

Ideal ecological strategy

Before the development analysis, I will explain my thinking preset, that is, a correct ecological strategy should be based on token price, TVL, user, Indicators such as the number of developers and the number of DApps have good performance, and these indicators will have an inherent logic of flywheel growth due to the ecological strategy, such as:

Technical basics The initial price of tokens is supported by investment, financing and early-stage communities, and the price of tokens supports TVL, and users and developers follow.

With the construction of the developer community, the improvement of tool chain and ecological support, the increase in developers has brought about an increase in the number of DApps and types.Various categories and innovations in technology and narratives, while the increase and increase of DApps and the corresponding wealth effect will bring new users and TVLs, which will increase the demand for token buyers to drive the price of tokens, thereby driving the prosperity of on-chain DeFi With the increase of users, this will in turn attract the increase of developers. As shown in the figure below:

The public chain is indispensable between each link Operators - often the foundation's ecological support (education, funding, incubation, market making, business matchmaking) and user-oriented marketing (education, subsidies, brand promotion) for developers and project teams. For example, from the growth of users and TVL to developers and DApps, foundations need to frequently organize developer activities and investment promotion activities when the public chain is in high popularity. On the one hand, they organize educational activities, hackerhouses, and HackerHouse to developers, and on the other hand, they take the initiative to Existing medium and large project teams have issued business invitations and launched ecological support plans such as multi-chain deployment of Grants, so that they can supply enough DApps and plates (mills) to the user market, and the foundation also needs to hype one or two leading applications and tokens. Help users focus on their attention and trigger topics and help developers and teams set market examples.

About the strategy

The following is to analyze Starknet. Regarding the analysis object, StarkWare is the development team of the Starknet public chain and the provider of most technical solutions such as nodes and provers. And occasionally, some developer activities are organized, referred to as SW in the following. Starrknet Foundation is the main body that manages the development of the Starknet ecosystem and is responsible for managing most of the $STRK tokens and ecological support activities, referred to as SF.

The following will analyze four types of strategies, such as those that are done wrong, those that are done right and good, those that are done right but not done badly, and controversial strategies, especially those that are done wrong, It is the third category. Since I don’t have a solid understanding of StarkWare and Starknet Foundation personnel information, I can only classify the parts that I think have done wrong or have not done anything as believing that they have done but have not done well, such as token market making and business development. .

First is to do something wrong

1. Lack of user-oriented brand PR. From SW, SN official promotions and executives to the community Kol, it shows an atmosphere of technology first and developer priority, which of course has an exclusion effect on ordinary users. The BD part has already mentioned that Starknet especially likes to post infrastructure cooperation tweets, SThe content of the targetWare is mainly technology. The Starknet Foundation is mainly developer content. The user-oriented and has a good market voice are the two accounts, Nurstar and Starknet Digger.

Other managers and eco kol are mainly tech content. This conclusion was drawn by me by browsing a lot of Starknet list Kol content and asking Grok. Developers are very important in the development of public chains, but Starknet is not used for developers.

Ask Grok

A particular incident that reflects the lack of user orientation is StarkWare Exploration lead Abdel said that the hair-begging party was an E-Begger. It was taken out of context as a satirizing that users are all electronic beggars, and some things are not on scales without two Two weights, even if you weigh a thousand pounds, you can't beat it. (I don’t want to whitewash or attack Abdel. Respect the work and spirit of a builder like him?)

Strictly speaking, it is difficult for users and developers to ignore the airdrop income at all. Most users and developers are to some extent hair-brushing parties. Public chains should not despise this but should Using everyone's profit-seeking characteristics, we guide everyone to continuously use and develop DApps instead of satirizing some users who interact with them for the sake of interests. The original meaning of Abdel is to refer to the hair-pushing party rather than all users. In addition, none of Starknet's official promotion and StarkWare and Starknet foundation managers have traffic accounts, and often posts some content that is difficult to attract users' concerns such as technology, developer communities, etc. On the other hand, the existing Starknet ecosystem is available. It is also difficult for applications to support account publishing content that praises the development of the application or promotes the application to users (sent back and forth to DOJO LootRealms Influence Cartridge, but their experience is not good at the moment, but Starknet does not have any projects to tweet). Starknet has not been new for a long time The fun, valuable and priced applications are released on the main website, which is also a problem with ecological support work.

2. Follow market traffic. Starknet's Twitter matrix also rarely publishes content and fomo projects with industry and global hot topics, such as 23 years of account abstraction, 24 years of inscription, 25 years of end of 24 to 25 years of Memecoin at the beginning of the year. Some investments and technology have been followed in Bitcoin in 24 years, but the traffic has not been imported into Starknet. For example, the Bitcoin sidechain Chakra, ZK solution QED invested by SW at that time, all have nothing to do with the Starknet main network. p>

Instead, I recommended two cross-chain BTC to Starknet to SW and SF - Interoperability projects only received routine Seed Grant and did not have additional support such as media or technology, which made me angry. What a good topic to talk about traffic. Starknet once had several inscriptions that left me alone. From the perspective of developers first, Starknet rarely follows market traffic, which is considered a unity of knowledge and action. Ethereum developers first because Ethereum can create concepts and lead innovation to traffic and investment. Starknet's media and ecological support teams are also Can't learn EF completely because it cannot create concepts and guide the market.

3. On-chain wallets do not support USDT withdrawals. From the main network in 24 years to the beginning of 25 years Not solved yet, this is not a technical/consensus puzzle at the OP_CAT level.

The things that are done right include:

1. Early application team funding and developer airdrops. From 21 years to At the end of 2023, StarkWare and Starknet Foundation granted funding to teams and developers deploying projects on Starknet testnet and mainnet in airdrop and targeted Grants, such as two rounds of Early Adopter Grants (EAG), Provison airdrops issued in early 2024- Submit code in related libraries - Participate in contribution certification as Starknet developers to obtain at least 10k$STRK. On the other hand, putting aside some analysis of rat warehouses, it is generous to users' airdrops and maintains considerable popularity of public chains, but subsequent ecological support and incubation have not kept up with this popularity.

< p style="text-align:center">

https://community.starknet.io/t/announcing-round-1-of-early-adopter-grants-eag/54269

The effect is to stabilize the Starknet developer community. This is actually something that is easy to find. The development cycle of the test network in 21 years to the update of the main network in 24 years is too long. There are constantly teams and developers leaving the Starknet ecosystem, and you will leave more if you don’t give money. The following picture is the developer data

https://app.aremis.xyz/developer-activity?ecosystemValue=Starknet

2. Ecological funding. The aforementioned funding and airdrops are sprinkler-like. Ecological funding is relatively directed drip irrigation for various track projects, such as DeFi Spring, which provides $STRK subsidy for DeFi projects and users, Propulsion Pilot Program for game teams, and multi-chain Growth Grant for later teams, Seed Grant for early teams and individual developers. It is good to have a complete form and not lose existing applications.

3. Community project collaboration. In addition to continuous airdrops and various funding, SE and SF have organized many project collaborations led by Starknet community developers. StarkWare's Exploration team organizes and guides the developer community A lot of projects have been done to form a project library list - KeepStarknetStrange. In addition, Starknet and Cairo language documents and most toolchains are built by the community, and have formed a huge group of developers for Starknet with open source project collaboration as the center. .

By the way Onlydust is the most important funding platform for Starknet project collaboration, StarknetEcological funds provide funding to open source projects through this platform.

Logo is used incorrectly as the old version of Starknet Logo, an error has been reported

4. Community localization construction. Africa, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia have a large number of local developer-led communities supported by foundations, which are often nonprofit organizations, daily work is dominated by locals, and are funded by SF and SW. and other support and organize various Starknet developer events, forming Starknet's global social tier. This PPT is a brief introduction to the Starknet community. Please go to the Feishu link to view

5. Technical infrastructure. Through investment, publicity, technical cooperation, etc., we support infrastructure development in Kakarot, application chain, sorter, account abstraction, BTC ZK, and full-chain games, and in theory lay the foundation for application innovation

But most of each infrastructure track does not produce outstanding user-side projects, most of which are just infrastructure investments, such as Kakarot and Lootrealms . Technical infrastructure. Through investment, publicity, technical cooperation, etc., the infrastructure development of Kakarot, application chain, sorter, account abstraction, BTC ZK, and full-chain games was supported, which theoretically laid the foundation for application innovation, but most infrastructure tracks did not run. Most of the projects that are outstanding are investments in infrastructure, such as Kakarot and DOJO (except Lootrealms, does one infrastructure only explode with one app). In the long run, these technological infrastructures are conducive to application innovation, but they do not mean that there will be application innovation. The missing logic in the middle is to guide developers and teams to build apps. In reality, the output conversion rate of developers is not high (hacks should be collected). Project data and comparison developer data

The previous talks about things that were done right and wrong, and now we will introduce those things that were done right but not Things done well (I just didn't realize whether SW and SF were done seriously, so they were classified as ecological strategies that did but did not do well) and points of controversy.

1. Token market making.$STRK fell all the way from $1.8-$2.6-$0.2, and for users, they are not only users of on-chain DApps but also holders of $STRK tokens. If the token price falls all the way, it means that every user of Starknet network will We must be at a good risk of losses.

Coin price users will kill double. Dialectically speaking, there is room for a longer-term development, but what application development does Starknet rely on to link the coin price?

On the other hand, Starknet The profits of the entire DeFi and projects with token economy will also be superimposed on losses due to the decline in token prices, and Starknet Spring’s DeFi subsidy cannot compensate for this part of the losses. Therefore, the collapse of token prices will drive user churn. In addition, user churn will also aggravate price collapse. On the one hand, it is caused by the lack of liquidity, and on the other hand, it is the pledge liquidation caused by the price plummeting. For example, I was personally liquidated tens of thousands of tokens at 0.4. , because I thought that an investor purchased $STRK from the Starknet Foundation through OTC at the end of the year from the Starknet Foundation at 0.4U, so I thought 0.4 was a safe price, but it has been 0.2 so far.

2. Memecoin ecological support. There is a token launcher UnRuggableMemecoin, but the system lacks liquidity support (market making and market pulling), Fomo's community culture, promotion and trading market. I have introduced several developers and teams who do Memecoin and plates to SW and SF. I vaguely said earlier that I didn’t support this form of project, but later it was general support. You need to promote, retweet and do a good job of project You can transfer the relevant account later, but there is no support.

Memecoin Starknet bro, which was once the founder of Starknet, also ended up supporting, and was cut to death. Me

The founder's platform is also an important factor. Early founders could not bear the face and users no longer paid when they were willing to end up (the founder's character design It’s really difficult to be an expert in ZK, but you are the founder and you must lead everyone to rush). Starknet founder Eli23-24 refusedMeme later supported Memecoin on Twitter. I think it was too late. The 2024 Starknet window period is so short. If you can't rush up with the popularity of the airdrop, you have to wait for the next cycle.

3. Business cooperation. I am a marketing professional. Most of my cooperation is centered on technical cooperation and media promotion without subsequent ecological drainage. There are no new users, limited activation of existing users, and no increase in tvl, which is an invalid exposure. Let's take a look at the relevance of Twitter's official announcement cooperation and on-chain data to prove/false this.

Cooperation with Polygon Avail

< p style="text-align: left;">This is also related to the partners selected by Starknet BD. Most of the partners are projects with strong infrastructure or strong technical style. In terms of human terms, users do not understand or cannot directly participate I mentioned in the previous Grok section that SW WF should find more task platforms, Poap, social, gaming, and Memecoin cooperation, and go to Rootdata for difficult choices.

4. Project conversion. Taking stock of the conversion rate of developer activities (such as Hacker House) to commercial projects, you can calculate the return on investment of the developer community that spent a lot of money on SF. If it is too low, the person in charge of the developer community will do useless work. , to be studied.

One ​​controversial point lies in mainland ecological management.

Mainland ecological management. Some people do developer activities in mainland China, one-to-one, one-to-many essays of the project team, ecological consultation (grant application, ecological support) and cooperation matchmaking (introduction to developers and foundations/Ware groups, and wallet search-NFT Market cooperation, expanding connections within the ecosystem, etc.)

The controversy is that this person stopped working. Why doesn’t he continue to actively support such work? Generally speaking, SF is doing developer activities in various places around the world, and building local communities is a well-effective strategy. Such as providing 5M funding to African communities and directly going to the Middle East community to do community growth, they are all very eye-catching.It can also build a local network. In the Asian market, the number of developers, users and total funds are leading the world (the data should be listed). SF and SW do almost nothing, while many other public chains (monad bera pi(doge)) come to the mainland and Hong Kong to do all kinds of things. Against the background of developers, users, and investors' activities, SF and SW are busy building other regions and are not neglecting a large market? The controversy lies in the fact that we come to the mainland to do things. Ware and the Foundation have information or difficulties that ordinary people do not know.

Summary of strategy

There is some data and research in progress, so the summary of Starknet here is only a partial summary based on current information, made by SW and SF The best part is: through continuous developer airdrops and funding, community-led open source projects and technical documents, online and offline developer activities all over the world, and supporting the independent development of various local developer communities to cultivate and be active for Starknet , expand and consolidate a huge community of developers that pursues outstanding technology and unite, which has developed most useful and a handful of useless infrastructure on Starknet, but has formed a unique community culture. However, the role of attracting ecological innovation applications, users and funds is very limited. The blame should be the SF community and funding department - that is, it has not converted a considerable number of high-quality development resources into a certain proportion of high-value APPs.

SF-led funding program has limited effect on ecological project growth, but has stabilized the ecological basic market, and the continuous decline in currency prices and user numbers eliminate this. The funding program does not guarantee that the quality of existing projects will continue to improve. On the other hand, the developer community has not guided developers and teams to produce projects that meet hot topics, projects with wealth effects, and projects with sufficient innovation and current use value.

The most promising full-chain game on the user side is innovative enough but user experience and tokens The economy and not accepted by the market need to develop.

The commercialization of Starknet seems desperately bad after the departure of former StarkWarew CEO Uri. Social media content and public relations show very obvious technical hardcore and user-friendly, almost completely missing the currency circle 24-25. All hot spots, Memecoin and other user-side application ecological support has no focus, business cooperation is in a form without conversion rate, The continuous decline in token prices and user churn form a new Davis double kill - the price drop makes users suffer losses and loses, and user flowThe loss has further reduced the revenue of public chains, market valuation, and profits of all public chain projects, which have further reduced the demand of buyers and the price of currency has fallen.

So based on the information and thoughts I have collected so far, I can give a small summary of Starknet: within a few months after the 24-year airdrop heat period, Starknet is not stable due to its lack of stability. The user and application ecosystem of the coin price in the currency price plus the ignoring of hot spots and missing the development window for almost three quarters, followed by an embarrassing bottleneck period - the developer community continues to produce some projects but does not continue to add new funds and users. Starknet has invested in some cutting-edge infrastructure such as AA, BTC ZK, application chain and full-chain games, so there is still a chance to return to the market center through emerging application innovations in the future, but that will happen for a while.

Writing background

Finally, some of my work experience will be attached to increase the value of this article. I am a grassroots MOD, Director of Starknet Private Investment and Investment Office. I want to write a lot of sensational words here, but I feel that it is not manly enough. I haven’t built Starknet recently because of psychological reasons.