Starknet, an open-source framework that aims to bring scalability and privacy to decentralized applications (dApps) built on Ethereum, has seen dramatic growth in various DeFi apps on the network over the past few months, with its total value locked (TVL) recently hitting a new all-time high
As of today, Starknet TVL stands at $10.49 million, a whopping ten-fold increase from $1.449 million at the beginning of March, according to DefiLlama.
TVL is a metric commonly used in decentralized finance (DeFi) to measure the total value of assets locked or deposited within a particular protocol, platform, or smart contract. It can serve as an indicator of the overall activity and popularity of a project.
Developed by Israeli-based company StarkWare, Starknet is designed to address the limitations of the Ethereum blockchain, such as high transaction fees and slow transaction processing times, by enabling off-chain computations and data storage while still leveraging the blockchain's security guarantees.
“I certainly cannot give any investment advice, but there are many, many developers that understand that in order to unleash Ethereum’s scale reaching a global demand you need new, safe, and battle-tested technologies,” StarkWare president and co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson told Decrypt, adding that Starknet is already recognized as a “hell of a technology stack."
To achieve this, Starknet leverages a layer-2 scaling technique known as zero-knowledge rollups, which bundles hundreds of thousands of transactions together off-chain and then verifies them on-chain for just a fraction of the cost.
While Starknet’s current TVL may be much lower than that of some other protocols in the same category, the protocol’s TVL was just about $800,000 at the start of the year.
The major player responsible for more than 57% (over $6 million) of Starknet TVL dominance is JediSwap, a fully permissionless AMM that enables users to swap, earn, and build instantaneously on the decentralized, community-driven protocol.
Other members of the layer-2 market slice, like Arbitrum and Optimism, for example, command TVLs of $2.4 billion and $884 million, respectively. This is in part due to the swift adoption among DeFi heavyweights on each network, including Uniswap, Aave, and Curve.
Speaking about other likely drivers behind Starknet’s growing popularity, the StarkWare chief mentioned Cairo, the Rust-inspired programming language, which is “the most modern and best smart contract language out there that developers are flocking to,” said Ben-Sasson.
The next thing that everyone is excited about, according to Ben-Sasson, is the next upgrade of the network–version 0.12 which is due to be released in June and is expected to result in a “significant increase in the throughput on Starknet.”