Starknet’s Real Product-Market Fit

Introduction

In crypto, “Product-Market Fit” (PMF) is often more of a meme than a milestone, a buzzword used loosely to describe hype cycles rather than real user demand.

But if we take PMF seriously, as the moment when a product solves a real need better than anything else, then Starknet is finally finding it.

This article breaks down why: from market needs to product primitives, from scalability and decentralization to UX and ecosystem maturity.

The goal? Understand what makes Starknet different; and whether it truly delivers on the hardest promise in crypto: scale without compromise.

Let’s start by the most important: the market.

I. Market

A. Target Customer

Who are we building for?

For a public blockchain like Starknet, we must distinguish between two levels of users:

1. Primary user: Developers/Builders

Public blockchains are ultimately platforms, where (in theory) everything can be built on it. As such, their first users, and main leverage points, are developers/builders. These developers/builders build applications, protocols, and games that attract and serve end users.

This segment can be broken down into three main archetypes relevant to Starknet:

• Crypto-native buildors frustrated by the EVM’s limits: These developers feel limited by the computational boundaries and rigid design of the EVM. They’re seeking a more expressive, performant, and scalable environment to build applications that go beyond what's currently feasible; think fully onchain games, consumer apps, ZK-based social apps, and high-frequency trading.

This market currently represents between 20k to 30k active developers (according to Electric Capital). Note that this tracking only accounts for open-source developers, so the real number of web3 devs is probably 2x–3x that. But even in the best case, let’s say 100k active devs, this is still a minuscule market compared to web2.

• UX-first builders aiming for web2-like experiences: These devs care deeply about user experience and want to deliver fast, seamless, abstracted interactions, without compromising on decentralization or ownership. They see current Web3 UX (wallets, seed phrases, gas fees) as a major blocker to adoption and want better primitives to build more user-friendly experiences.

• Web2 developers: Developers who want to offer more than just traditional services, and are starting to explore web3. They’re interested in giving users true self-custody, ownership, composability with other web3 services (like DeFi), and native monetization, while maintaining a UX their users can actually handle.

Together, UX-first and Web2 developers form a global market of 25–30 million (according to ChatGPT), over 300x the size of today’s crypto-native builder base. While Starknet initially focused on crypto-native devs, the other two segments are becoming increasingly strategic.

In short: these developers/builders are looking for an execution environment that unlocks new capabilities, introduces UX-native primitives, and aligns long-term with decentralization.

2. Secondary customer: End users

The end users arrive once developers/builders ship things they want. And again, devs can basically build everything on public chains. Starknet seems to appeal to:

• Gamers, drawn to the possibility of fully onchain games (where items, strategy, and computation all live onchain and the structure is self-custodial and permissionless), enabled by performance, UX, and dedicated tooling.

• DeFi users, looking for more efficient trading experiences, better yield opportunities, and more advanced use cases.

• Consumer app users, onboarded by true web2-like UX. They care about usability first, but increasingly value the guarantees of Web3: ownership, transparency, and composability.

These users are often mobile-first, low-friction adopters, and highly sensitive to poor UX. They don’t want to deal with seed phrases, tx popups, or network switching. Today’s infrastructure doesn’t serve them well, and that’s exactly why Starknet is building its layer.

B. Underserved Needs

What is the market currently failing to deliver?

Across both developers and users, three major pain points consistently emerge.

1. Scalability without compromise

All chains currently force a trade-off between performance and decentralization.

• High-performance chains (like Hyperliquid) often push decentralization to the background to achieve speed and low latency.

• The decentralization and fully secure chains (Bitcoin and Ethereum) are not scalable and provide a poor UX; slow tx, high fees.

As such, the market is missing a solution that offers all in one:

• High throughput + low latency

• Low, predictable fees

• Full secure and decentralize

On the last point, a legit question arises in today’s market landscape: why even care about decentralization and security if no one seems to care right now?

Because having a blockchain that’s cheap, fast, and scalable is gud, but without decentralization and security, it’s all meaningless. At its core, a blockchain should be more than just a database, it’s a trustless coordination engine. Strip away decentralization and security, and what you're left with… is just a slow, inefficient database. And for that, centralized systems do the job better.

So sacrificing decentralization and security is a risky short-term bet. Just look at the graveyard of centralized actors in crypto: Mt. Gox, FTX, Celsius… Sooner or later, the same kind of collapse will happen to an onchain service that cuts corners.

In the centralized world, everything works, until it doesn’t. And when it breaks, you basically lose everything.

2. Web2-grade UX with Web3 guarantees

Crypto UX today is a nightmare for most users:

• Seed phrases management

• Transaction signing popups

• Confusing gas fees

• Not UX friendly advanced security measures on their wallet

• Limited mobile support

Even for devs, building good UX is hard: you have to build your own Account Abstraction (AA) infra (not even possible on all chains), live with the friction between EOA and AA now on Ethereum, and waste a lot of time explaining UX flows that should just “work”. There’s a huge gap between what the market wants and what’s feasible out of the box.

There’s a growing need for:

• UX primitives that abstract complexity

• Mobile-first flows with social login and embedded wallets

• Unified patterns across dApps; not every app building its own UX layer from scratch

3. Long-term credible ecosystems

Much of the market is focused on short-term extraction:

• Protocols launch, extract liquidity, and die

• Ecosystems chase attention, not fundamentals

• Builders have no guarantee that the platform will support them across cycles

There’s a need for ecosystems that are:

• Actively innovating on infra, not just marketing

• Built by teams with a multi-cycle vision and track record

• Committed to decentralization and open source

To put it simply: today’s crypto market offers terrible UX, lacks environments that are truly decentralized, secure and scalable, and most projects are focused on short-term extraction before abandoning ship.

So, the market’s needs are clear:

• Developers want an execution environment beyond the EVM, one that unlocks new paradigms and removes friction.

• Users want faster, simpler, more seamless experiences, without giving up on trustlessness and ownership.

• Builders and users want to rely on an ecosystem that will last, not one that chases hype and collapses with the cycle.

So the next question is: how does Starknet respond to these unmet needs?

Let’s move to the top layers of the pyramid, and explore the Product.

II. Product.

a. Value proposition

Why does Starknet exist?

Starknet is a blockchain that scales without sacrificing decentralization or security, while offering a web2-grade UX to everyone. It provides a fundamentally different blockchain experience: one that combines performance, great user experience, security, and long-term alignment, without compromise.

Here’s how:

• Scalability without sacrifice: High TPS, low latency, and cheap fees are already live and improving, without compromising decentralization or security. Starknet has a clear roadmap toward full decentralization, while continuing to upgrade its performance.

• Best-in-class UX: Thanks to native Account Abstraction (since genesis), Starknet allows builders to abstract blockchain complexity for users: gasless transactions, invisible wallets, social logins, multi-factor authentication, no transaction popups… Starknet enables dApps that look and feel like Web2 while staying fully onchain.

• Long-term alignment: In a space flooded by short-term plays, Starknet is designed for resilience and multi-cycle relevance. The StarkWare team (Starknet’s main contributor) has been pushing innovations initially ignored by the market, then adopted by the entire industry: from STARKs to Validiums, proof aggregation, and altVMs. Builders choosing Starknet are aligning with a stack and a vision that has already shaped crypto’s past, and will shape its future.

In short, Starknet delivers the performance developers need, the UX users expect, and the integrity blockchains promise, all in one architecture.

b. Feature set

How does Starknet deliver on its promise?

The reason Starknet can deliver on its ambitious value proposition is simple, but radical: it wasn’t built by assembling existing parts, it was built from scratch.

Where most competitors opted for speed by reusing the EVM and minimal changes to existing stacks, StarkWare took the hard path: building a new layer, a new VM (Cairo), a new proving system, and an entirely new approach to blockchain UX. This choice required more time, effort, and resources, but it laid the foundation for long-term superiority. Now that the gap has been closed, the technological lead between Starknet and its competitors will only widen.

What follows is a breakdown of how this design delivers real advantages across four critical dimensions:

1. Scalability primitives; to enable complex, performant apps

2. Security & decentralization; for credible trust and long-term alignment

3. UX abstraction features; to onboard users beyond crypto-natives

4. A long-term focused ecosystem; built for sustainable innovation and builder compounding

1. Scalability primitives

As mentioned above, Starknet made the decision to build everything from scratch; including a new virtual machine: the CairoVM. It’s a custom VM, purpose-built for ZK proofs and scalable, provable computation. In short: a high-performance, Turing-complete VM optimized for ZK proofs from day one.

The ELI5? Cairo enables execution patterns that are simply impossible on the EVM, unlocking a new class of applications, especially those requiring heavy onchain computation (like gaming and AI). It also offers developers a fundamentally better tradeoff curve.

Thanks to this design, Starknet has gone from one of the worst-performing stacks in 2023 to one of the best-performing ones today, in just ~18 months of optimization.

And when we talk about stack performance, imo there are three key dimensions to consider:

• Speed: Last year, the average tx speed was around 15 seconds. Today, the average tx speed is between 1–2 seconds, and StarkWare has plans to bring that below 1 second. Faster, faster, faster

• TPS capacity: Starknet can currently support around 1,000 TPS, with clear plans to optimize further (10k and more) once TPS becomes the bottleneck.

• Gas fees: Starknet is currently one of the cheapest L2s to use. And what’s beautiful about its design is this: the more it’s used, the cheaper it gets. While most chains see higher fees with more usage, Starknet flips the script: as long as TPS capacity isn’t saturated, more activity = lower fees per user. Even more importantly, Starknet is the most cost-efficient rollup on the market, meaning it has the largest margin to reduce fees even further.

The trend is clear: TPS up only. Fees down only. Moar speed.

Starknet’s scalability will continue to improve with several major upgrades coming soon:

• Cairo Native: Improving sequencer performance by 3–5x

• Mempool / Fee Market: Users will be able to compete for priority execution (the more you pay, the faster your tx gets confirmed)

• Stwo (Next-Gen Starknet Prover): A 1,000x faster prover than the current Starknet one. It enables faster, cheaper STARK proofs, lowers costs for onchain activity (including Bitcoin-related projects), and introduces unique capabilities like client-side proving

So Starknet is already one of the most scalable L2s out there and it’s only getting better.

And builders can now use this tech to build whatever they have in mind, directly on Starknet L2, or as a dedicated L2/L3 appchains. The SN Stack (Starknet’s appchain offering) is open and available to everyone; with it, the potential becomes virtually infinite, all within a unified security and UX model.

What does this mean?

Builders can now deploy their own custom Starknet chains, optimized for specific use cases and user needs.

By building with the SN Stack, devs get access to:

• The most battle-tested ZK stack in the game; trusted by Sorare, Immutable, Paradex, and more

• The most resource-efficient rollup architecture live today

• One of the fastest-scaling L2s, already delivering ~1,000 TPS capacity

• A Web2-grade UX, thanks to native Account Abstraction (Session Keys, Paymasters, Multicall…)

• A stack that keeps improving passively thanks to all innovations brought by the Starknet ecosystem

• Seamless L1 <> L2 <> L3 abstraction if needed, powered by Karnot

• Both the Ethereum and Bitcoin liquidities/communities

Starknet now offers the full spectrum of scaling options :

• Starknet L2 → for maximum composability

• Starknet L2 appchains → for greater flexibility

• Starknet L3 appchains → for hyperscaling and ultimate control

Leveraging it, builders can hyperscale every kind of use case.

2. Security & Decentralization

Security without compromise is core to Starknet’s DNA. Starknet is designed not only to scale, but to scale safely, in alignment with the trust guarantees of Ethereum (and soon also Bitcoin).

Here’s how:

• STARK proofs: Starknet leverages STARKs, the most secure and quantum-resistant proof system available. Battle-tested on StarkEx since 2020 and live on Starknet since 2021, STARKs have already scaled: 1B+ tx on StarkEx, 180M+ tx on Starknet, $1.3T+ in cumulative trading volume…

• No trusted setup: Unlike SNARKs, STARKs don’t require any trusted setup. This removes a critical trust assumption, and Starknet is the only Validity/ZK Rollup in production without a trusted setup

• Stage 1 Rollup classification: Starknet is now recognized by L2Beat as a Stage 1 Rollup, and the ecosystem is already working on the stage 2 (at this point, the network will be fully trustless thanks to a full trustless escape guarantees)

• Open-sourcing core components: Starknet is committed to open-sourcing all its core components (next up: Stwo and the new sequencer Apollo)

• Most decentralized stack of any L2: and by faaaar

• Progressive decentralization: Starknet is currently transitioning toward a network decentralized by a PoS consensus. We are at the 1/4 stage of this transition, with the second phase coming next month on Mainnet. This is powered by STRK staking, with soon a new addition: BTC staking, enabling the network to be secured by a dual-token mechanism.

And note that, while decentralizing a system results in performance loss, it won’t be the case for Starknet, thanks to Malachite by Informatic system. Why decentralization = loss of performance? Because coordination between multiple validators introduces latency; a global network of validators must constantly exchange messages, which is inherently slower than a centralized system where a single entity makes all the decisions.

Currently, Starknet operates with a single centralized sequencer. But by Phase 3 of STRK staking (expected by the EOY), the network will transition to a decentralized sequencer network. In theory, this should slow Starknet down (lower TPS, increased latency). But thanks to Malachite built by @informalinc it won’t! Malachite is a flexible and high-performance consensus engine written in Rust, optimized for speed and reliability. Simply put: an ultra-fast and efficient consensus mechanism.

According to the article and test results:

• This consensus can handle ~50k TPS (tested with 10MB blocks).

• Latency of ~780ms for 100 validators (meaning an ultra-fast finalization time even in a decentralized network).

So with Malachite, consensus will no longer be a bottleneck, and by phase 3 of STRK staking, Starknet will be:

• More robust: one sequencer today vs. over 100 tomorrow.

• More decentralized

• Still high-performance, with scalability further enhanced by other network upgrades (Cairo-Native, Stwo, etc...).

Starknet is the real answer to the blockchain trilemma, and it's solving it not just for Ethereum, but for Bitcoin too (maybe even more ecosystems in the future… who knows ).

3. Blockchain complexity abstraction, providing a web2 grade UX

Starknet literally provides the best UX of the market.

First off, while Ethereum is finally integrating Account Abstraction in the EVM ecosystem, Starknet has had it natively and as the standard since 2021. And this makes a big difference.

On EVM chains, developers now have to support both EOAs and smart contract wallets, which means any feature relying on Account Abstraction is limited by backward compatibility. On Starknet? All accounts are smart contracts, meaning all the tooling, infrastructure and dApps provides a unified UX/DevX

Here is a non-exhaustive list of all Account Abstraction based features the Starknet ecosystem is providing to its users:

• 1-click everything: swap, add liquidity, lend, borrow… all in a single tx

• Session Keys: let users delegate signing permissions to a dApp for a limited time or spending cap. That means you can interact onchain without signing every transaction. In gaming, it’s sign once, then play for hours/days. No interruptions, just game on.

• Paymasters: unlock two powerful use cases:

1. Multi-token gas payments: Users can pay fees in over 10 tokens everywhere on Starknet, not just ETH or STRK. AVNU currently powers most of this infra, and a native, protocol-level Paymaster is on the roadmap.

2. Sponsored transactions: Apps can cover gas fees for their users, just like Web2 platforms (Facebook or Amazon) don’t make users pay for infra costs.

Result? A smoother, more flexible UX, with zero friction at the gas layer.

• Invisible wallets: bundle multiple UX primitives (Paymasters, Session Keys, social login…) into a single interface. With invisible wallets, users don’t need to think about gas tokens, tx popups, or wallet setup, they just use the app.

• Multifactor authentication (2FA/3FA): is offered by wallets like Argent and Braavos, letting users add extra layers of security. With it, even if someone steals your seed phrase, they can’t move funds without your confirmation.

• L1 <> L2 <> L3 abstraction, enabled by Karnot, hides the complexity of interacting across multiple layers; making cross-layer experiences feel native, instant, and smooth af.

And again: because AA is native on Starknet, UX patterns like one-click interactions, or fee abstraction are consistent across all the Starknet ecosystem applications, no fragmentation between EOAs and smart accounts like on Ethereum. That consistency across the stack is what no other chain on Ethereum can claim today, so devs don’t need to reinvent the wheel for UX.

Together, these primitives unlock Web2-grade onboarding with Web3-level guarantees.

That’s why Starknet is the only chain today where a consumer app like Focus Tree was able to onboard ~300k blockchain noobs onchain in just three weeks. By combining Paymasters with invisible wallets, users don’t need to touch the blockchain, they just use the product. And it cost them only $1.1k to do it.

In short: Starknet hides the blockchain without removing what makes it matter.

Web3 benefits with Web2 UX, only on Starknet.

4. A long-term focused ecosystem; built for sustainable innovation and builder compounding

As mentioned earlier, with a few exceptions, the vast majority of today’s crypto landscape is made up of grifters and short-term extractors. And when projects aren’t extractive, they’re often simply overwhelmed, unable to keep up with the pace of innovation and the speed at which this market evolves.

For builders who genuinely want to build for the long term, choosing an ecosystem is hard. Most ecosystems are already irrelevant, or were never designed to last beyond a single market cycle.

Now, if those same builders also want a network that is secure, decentralized, and scalable, the options are nonexistent. That was true… until Starknet.

I'm not going to repeat the scalability, security, and decentralization points here, but once again, Starknet stands out as one of the very few ecosystems prio