Author: flowie , ChainCatcher
Editor: Marco, ChainCatcher
Last week, the Starknet Foundation announced the replacement of its CEO. Diego Oliva, who has served as CEO of the Starknet Foundation since March 2023, will be replaced by James Strudwick, who is responsible for ecological growth.
This is not the first time that the Starknet team has changed important senior management 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 the community criticized Starknet for airdrop distribution issues at the beginning of the year, the controversy it faces 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 from investors, members of the Starknet Foundation also encountered dissatisfaction with their defense of ZKX.
The frequent changes of CEOs, coupled with Starknet’s “inaction” after causing multiple public opinion crises, make it difficult for users not to question the operating conditions of the organization behind it.
After the controversy, has replacing CEO become a habit?
After facing community controversy, quickly replacing CEOs seems to have become Starknet's habitual operation.
On December 1 last year, Starknet’s official announcement of the airdrop caused dissatisfaction in the community. Many ordinary users questioned that Starknet’s airdrop rules favored developers while ignoring the interests of ordinary users.
One month after the airdrop controversy, Uri Kolodny, CEO of StarkWare, the developer of Starknet, 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, the CEO who left, has a business and capital background, while the others 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 the Electric Coin Company (also known as Zcash Co).
As the airdrop controversy has not yet subsided, the CEO's resignation has also caused community users to speculate 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. After Uri announced his resignation as CEO, his successor Eli Ben-Sasson did not express condolences, which may further confirm the speculation of internal conflicts.
Just half a year after the replacement of StarkWare CEO, Starknet staged the same drama again after facing controversy over the shutdown of the ecosystem's leading derivatives protocol ZKX. Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, resigned and was replaced by James Strudwick, head of ecosystem growth.
Diego Oliva has only been the CEO of the Starknet Foundation for a little over a year. Prior to 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 provide any explanation for the reason for Diego Oliva's departure, but only stated that the Starknet Foundation team structure 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 its current size of more than thirty people; and has launched multiple ecological programs such as DeFi Spring, Seed Grants, Catalyst and Propulsion programs, and has cooperated with more than 100 infrastructure teams.
James, who took over as CEO, has only joined the Starknet Foundation for about half a year, and has mainly promoted the work of DeFi, L1 and L2 expansion projects.
Regarding the frequent changes of CEOs, although community users have some expectations for the new official taking office, there seem to be more voices of pessimism. Twitter user @Timmy_Turnes said, "I feel like this is heading 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 made an official response. The replacement of the CEO at this time shows that the organization’s operations are in very poor condition.
@wholisticguy questioned the fact that the new CEO of the foundation was once the ecological director, and the number of followers of account X was only more than 400 (which increased to more than 900 after the announcement of his appointment as CEO).
@wholisticguy said: "As one of the most technically competent L2 teams, cultivating Twitter followers should be like fishing in a barrel. You don't need to have 100k followers, but only a few hundred followers indicates a lack of engagement."
Starknet has created its own public opinion crisis many times
Changing the CEO may also be Starknet's way of saving itself after facing a downturn in development and a public opinion crisis.
Starknet, which has advantages in technical strength and Vitalik's investment, seems to be particularly indifferent in its marketing and public relations attitude.
Whether it is the airdrop controversy or the closure of the ecological project ZKX, Starknet has rarely taken any action in the face of the continued fermentation of community sentiment, and team members have made several inappropriate remarks that have triggered new public opinion controversies and a crisis of trust.
In January this year, Starknet was frequently rumored to have airdropped but it has not yet landed. The community users who were already emotional were "ridiculed" by the Starknet officials.
Abdelhamid Bakhta, a core member of Starknet, 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" in the official Discord channel, which aroused the anger of the community.
Although Abdelhamid and Starknet official channels urgently deleted their comments and apologized after the public opinion fermented, Abdelhamid and Starknet CEO Eli Ben-Sasson were still subjected to online verbal attacks for a long time.
At present, the comment section of Starknet’s official social media is still full of sarcastic remarks about the “electronic beggar chain”.
Regarding the widely circulated statement that "Starknet has only 8 daily active users" since April, although it 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, Starknet's leading derivatives protocol, announced its closure six weeks after TGE, triggering criticism from ZKX investors, who called ZKX a scam and demanded that StarkNet and the exchanges listed on it reveal the truth.
Starknet did not respond to this. 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 (which I am not defending). This will have a negative impact on you and your judgment.”
The seemingly inappropriate remarks made by members of the Starknet Foundation once again sparked dissatisfaction among users, and Starknet was ridiculed for having only single-digit daily active users.
The criticism of ZKX has also risen to question the status of the Starknet ecological network. Many community users said that the lack of activity in the Starknet ecological network is the key reason why the ZKX team cannot continue even if they get 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 its network activity and coin price plummeted, @cryptonerdcn, a developer on the Starknet ecosystem, has lowered its expectations for Starknet.
But @cryptonerdcn said that it is not too pessimistic. Judging from the participation in the Starknet hackathon in June, the activity of its ecosystem developers is not as bleak as expected.
@cryptonerdcn mentioned that after the price of the coin plummeted, he 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 EVM teams who can bring all kinds of repackaged things to participate in the competition, many projects in this hackathon are completely started from scratch."
In @cryptonerdcn’s opinion, if Starknet can work hard to make up for its shortcomings in marketing and other areas, it will at least not end up being a dead end.
Judging from Starknet’s recent developments, continued technical upgrades remain a top priority. The Starknet community released v0.13.2 and the summer roadmap, and 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.
The v0.13.3 version was launched from October to November. The essential content of this version is Cairo-native, which emphasizes faster execution to further shorten the confirmation time.
However, Ethereum Layer2 is too complex, and increasing 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, Starknet announced that it would become the first network to settle transactions on both Bitcoin and Ethereum, and scale Bitcoin to thousands of transactions per second. This would be achieved within six months of Bitcoin’s potential upgrade OP_CAT.
Cryptography analyst Haotian said that although Starknet faces too many challenges and uncertainties in its layout of the Bitcoin ecosystem, "Once the narrative constraints of (Ethereum) layer 2 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 original high-performance foundations such as ZK technology, parallel transactions, and Cario language will become its core advantages that distinguish it from other Layer2s.
