StarkWare is restructuring into two business units and cutting staff as it shifts from scaling Ethereum to creating revenue-generating products of its own, a shift forced by a more than 99% collapse in revenue on its flagship Starknet network.
The changes were outlined during a company-wide town hall meeting hosted by CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, where he told employees that StarkWare would be restructured into two independent units and focus on creating revenue-generating products internally. CoinDesk reviewed a transcript of the speech to staff.
The Starknet chain’s revenue, which peaked at nearly $6 million in a single month at the end of 2023, amounted to approximately $48,000 during the first half of April 2026, according to DefiLlama data. The drop partly affects the entire industry, and Starknet’s competitors are equally affected, as Ethereum’s EIP-4844 update in March 2024 slashed Layer 2 fee revenue across the board.
The total value locked (TVL), however, remains above $200 million.
Ben-Sasson told employees that the company now needs to “take our technological superiority… and turn it into meaningful revenue, into meaningful use,” signaling a shift from a purely infrastructure focus toward creating products that can drive demand directly.
He added that StarkWare would prioritize creating “things no other team can do, no other way,” focusing resources on products with “immense revenue potential” rather than extensive experimentation.
“I started in this field in 2013, almost 13 years ago, and I’ve been through quite a few winters,” Ben-Sasson said at the town hall. “I think what marks this winter is that there is a very clear void in leadership in blockchain, and it affects even things like Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
The company will launch 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 signing schemes with hash-based proofs, but comes with significant drawbacks, requiring extensive off-chain computation and costing between $75 and $200 per transaction, versus about $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 Proposals repository in February, but could take years to activate.
Ben-Sasson did not name Bitcoin or quantum security as the focus of the Applications unit, saying only that StarkWare would focus on products “that cannot be manufactured by any of our competitors” and would be built with “minimal dependencies on external L1 or external application teams.”
More details, he told staff, will come next week.
A StarkWare spokesperson declined a request for comment.
