What to know : StarkWare is restructuring into two independent business units and cutting staff after revenue on its Starknet network fell more than 99% from a late-2023 peak. CEO Eli Ben-Sasson told employees the company will pivot from a pure Ethereum-scaling infrastructure focus to building in-house, revenue-generating products that competitors cannot easily replicate. A new Applications unit, led by researcher Avihu Levy, will pursue high-revenue products with minimal reliance on external blockchains, following his work on a costly but quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction scheme.
StarkWare is restructuring into two business units and cutting staff as it pivots from scaling Ethereum toward building revenue-generating products of its own — a shift forced by a more than 99% collapse in revenue on its flagship Starknet network.
The changes were outlined during a company-wide town hall hosted by CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, where he told employees StarkWare would restructure into two independent units and focus on building revenue-generating products in-house. A transcript of the address to staff was reviewed by CoinDesk.
Starknet chain revenue, which peaked near $6 million in a single month in late 2023, stood at roughly $48,000 through the first half of April 2026, according to DefiLlama data. The decline is partly industry-wide, with Starknet's competitors equally impacted, as Ethereum's EIP-4844 upgrade in March 2024 slashed Layer 2 fee revenue across the board.
Total Value Locked (TVL), however, remains above $200 million.
Ben-Sasson told employees the company now needs to "take our technological superiority… and convert it into meaningful revenue, meaningful usage," signaling a shift away from a pure infrastructure focus toward building products that can drive demand directly.
He added that StarkWare would prioritize building "things that can be done by no other team, in no other way," focusing resources on products with "immense potential revenue" rather than broad experimentation.
"I started in this field in 2013, almost 13 years ago, and I've seen quite a number of winters," Ben-Sasson said at the town hall. "I think what marks this winter is that there's a very clear vacuum in leadership across blockchain, and it affects even things like Bitcoin and Ethereum."
The company will spin up a new revenue-focused Applications unit led by researcher Avihu Levy.
Levy's promotion comes days after he published a paper outlining Quantum Safe Bitcoin, or QSB, a method for making bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum attacks without requiring changes to the protocol.
The approach replaces traditional signature schemes with hash-based proofs but comes with significant tradeoffs, requiring extensive off-chain computation and costing an estimated $75 to $200 per transaction, versus roughly $0.33 for a standard bitcoin payment.
QSB offers an alternative to BIP-360, a long-pending proposal to add quantum resistance to Bitcoin at the protocol level that was merged to Bitcoin's improvement proposal repository in February but could take years to activate.
Ben-Sasson did not name Bitcoin or quantum safety as the Applications unit's target, saying only that StarkWare would focus on products "that cannot be done by any of our competitors" and build with "minimal dependencies on external L1s or external application teams."
More details, he told staff, would come next week.
A spokesperson for StarkWare declined a request to comment.
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