Starknet frequently changes its leadership: Is it self-rescue or falling into a deeper trust crisis?

Original title: "Behind the frequent changes of CEO, Starknet is in a deep trust crisis"

Original 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 2 months after TGE. Amid the criticism from investors, members of the Starknet Foundation also encountered dissatisfaction with their defense of ZKX.

The frequent replacement of CEOs, coupled with Starknet's "inaction" after multiple public opinion crises, makes it difficult for community users not to question the operation of the organization behind it.

After the controversy, has the replacement of CEO become a habit?

Faced with community controversy, 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 favor developers and ignore the interests of ordinary users.

One month after the airdrop controversy, 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 was 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 his team has internal conflicts. Some users believe that Uri Kolodny's reason for resigning as CEO due to family health issues is too far-fetched. And after Uri announced his resignation as CEO, his successor Eli Ben-Sasson did not express condolences, which may further confirm the speculation of internal contradictions.

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

Diego Oliva has only served as CEO of Starknet Foundation for more than 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 Starknet official blog mentioned that during Diego Oliva's tenure, the Starknet Foundation has grown from a team of two part-time employees to more than 30 people at present; it has also launched multiple ecological programs such as DeFi Spring, Seed Grants, and Catalyst and Propulsion programs, and has 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'm going to a new low..."

@TheJinKang believes that Starknet is facing a crisis of trust. He said that after the shutdown of the ecological project ZKX, neither the Starknet Foundation nor the CEO came forward to respond officially. The replacement of the CEO at this time shows that the organization's operations are in very poor condition.

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 its own public opinion crisis

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

Starknet, which has always been advantageous in terms of 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 sentiment, 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 airdrops but they have not landed yet. The emotional community users were "ridiculed" by the Starknet official.

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 for "e-beggars" to the official Discord channel, which aroused the anger of the community.

Although Abdelhamid and the Starknet official channel urgently deleted their 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 section of Starknet’s official social media is still full of sarcastic remarks about the “Electronic Beggar Chain”.

Although the widely circulated statement that “Starknet has only 8 daily active users” in 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 has occurred again. Starknet’s leading derivatives protocol ZKX announced its closure 6 weeks after TGE, triggering ZKX’s investors to attack it, claiming that ZKX is a scam, and 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 once again aroused users' dissatisfaction. Starknet was ridiculed for having only single-digit daily active users.

The crusade against ZKX also rose to question 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's current daily active users and daily transaction numbers, as well as DEX intraday transaction volume, and daily captured transaction fees are ranked last. And while many Layer2s have generated positive profits, Starknet is still not profitable.

Expanding the BTC ecological 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 participation in the Starknet hackathon in June, the activity of its ecosystem developers is not as bleak as imagined.

@cryptonerdcn mentioned that after the price of the coin 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 starknet uses the cairo language, there are very few people who understand it compared to solidity (I remember only a few dozen), and compared to the evm system, which can take all kinds of repackaged 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, at least it will not become "dead".

From the recent dynamics 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, emphasizing 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 OP_CAT.

Crypto technology 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 extends 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.

Original link