StarkWare is restructuring into two business units and reducing its workforce as it shifts from scaling Ethereum to building its own revenue-generating products — a shift forced by a more than 99% collapse in revenue from its flagship Starknet network.
The changes were presented at a company-wide town hall hosted by CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, where he told employees that StarkWare would restructure into two independent units and focus on creating revenue-generating products internally. A transcript of the speech to staff was reviewed by CoinDesk.
Starknet’s channel revenue, which peaked at nearly $6 million in a single month in late 2023, stood at around $48,000 through the first half of April 2026, according to DefiLlama data. The decline is partly industry-wide, with Starknet’s competitors also affected, with Ethereum’s EIP-4844 upgrade in March 2024 having significantly reduced Layer 2 fee revenue across the board.
The total value locked (TVL), however, remains above $200 million.
Ben-Sasson told employees that the company must now “harness our technological superiority…and convert it into meaningful revenue and meaningful use,” signaling a move away from a pure focus on infrastructure toward creating products that can directly drive demand.
He added that StarkWare would prioritize creating “things that can’t be done by any other team, in any other way,” focusing resources on products with “immense revenue potential” rather than extensive experimentation.
“I started in this business in 2013, almost 13 years ago, and I’ve seen quite a few winters,” Ben-Sasson said at City Hall. “I think what’s notable about this winter is that there’s a very clear leadership void in blockchain, and it’s even affecting things like Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
The company will create a new revenue-focused applications unit, led by researcher Avihu Levy.
Levy’s promotion comes days after he published a paper describing 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 calculations and costing between $75 and $200 per transaction, compared to around $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 into the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal Repository in February, but it could take years to activate.
Ben-Sasson did not name Bitcoin or quantum security as a target for the Applications unit, saying only that StarkWare would focus on products “that cannot be done by any of our competitors” and would build with “minimal dependencies on external L1s or external applications teams.”
More details, he told staff, would be provided next week.
A StarkWare spokesperson declined a request for comment.
