65,000 Daily Users and a $302M TVL: The Numbers Behind the Claim
Starknet sees about 65,000 daily active users, putting it at number five for on-chain activity among Layer 2 networks. Arbitrum is still the top Layer 2 network, but Starknet's recent growth has got people talking. The network's total value locked reached $302.12 million in mid-January 2026, the first time it has been over $300 million since 2024. Starknet's stablecoin market cap just reached a new peak of almost $248 million.
Extended, a platform for continuous trading, moved from StarkEx to Starknet, bringing with it $220M in total value locked. The protocol took months to build. DeFi protocols are choosing the network because it runs well.
Fees are another thing to consider. According to DefiLlama, fees went up 17% last week, while the total value locked dropped 2% during that time. This shows real usage growth, not just money sitting in yield farms. Starknet's on-chain fee data shows market signals that traders often miss, which can cause assets to be mispriced and lead to missed chances to improve position. The question is whether the base can handle this growth, and that's where the system that ensures transactions are valid comes in.
Behind Those Numbers: The S-Two Prover Making It Possible
Starknet v0.14.0 is now available, featuring decentralized sequencing that switches between three separate sequencers. StarkWare is running all three sequencers right now, with plans for validators to take over by 2026. Pre-confirmations speed up transactions, shrinking the time from two seconds to just half a second. Block times fell from 30 seconds to 4 seconds, a 7.5x improvement that directly affects user experience for anyone interacting with a starknet wallet or DeFi application.
StarkWare's S-two prover takes care of generating proofs across the network. The update lowers transaction costs and adds privacy features, such as shielded balances for strkBTC. The fee system works like EIP-1559, dividing l2_gas costs into base fees and priority tips. To do V3 transactions, you'll need STRK tokens for the gas fees. AVNU's payment system allows people to pay gas fees using tokens besides STRK. Because every transaction needs STRK, its demand stays steady, no matter how busy the network is or what apps are running. It's still uncertain if demand will keep up with the 2% monthly rise in supply. What sets this infrastructure apart from competing L2s is the basic approach to proving transactions are valid.
Why Starknet's Competitors Pay More for Slower Finality
Transaction speed has a direct impact on user and developer experience. With optimistic rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism, there's a 7-day window to challenge transactions. Starknet's validity proofs get confirmed on the mainnet faster compared to optimistic rollups, which need challenge periods before they're finalized. Ethereum's system confirms transactions right away, so there are no wait times, and once a block is confirmed, it can't be challenged.
Transaction costs fluctuate depending on network congestion. Optimistic rollups put transaction data on-chain and give validators a challenge period to check if it's correct. Validity rollups shrink that info into a code-based proof. Making those proofs used to be pricey, which canceled out savings on gas. But the S-two prover is meant to solve this.
Starknet's stablecoin market currently sits at $248 million, which suggests investors think its cost system is good enough to put money in. LayerZero's Starknet token support expands beyond previous capabilities. Circle's CCTP makes moving USDC around the network easier. Both moves should get more people using the network and show that gas fees haven't stopped developers from building on Starknet.
STRK's market cap of $220 million is less than the value of stablecoin transactions happening on its network. STRK price is trading at $0.04, but it's hard to say where the starknet price will go next since the starknet crypto market is unstable right now. CoinGecko's data shows traders are still selling off their positions. The token's price dropped before the planned release of 127 million STRK tokens in December 2025, valued at around $13.87 million. Network problems compounded the selloff, including a January 5, 2026 outage that forced an 18-minute block production rollback. Trust took a hit, and getting investors back takes time.
The Cairo Trade-Off: Better Proofs, Harder Onboarding
Starknet went with Cairo, a special language for verifiable calculations, instead of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Cairo lets coders make programs that create math proofs to show the code works as it should. Starknet crypto validators check calculations by looking at proofs instead of doing the computations all over again. Optimistic rollups work differently, presuming transactions are good unless someone challenges them within a set time.
Cairo can be tricky for developers who are just starting out. Moving Ethereum contracts to Starknet can be tough for Solidity developers because Cairo's code style and structure are quite different. In late February 2026, StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation introduced Starkzap, an open-source TypeScript SDK meant to fix this compatibility issue. Now, developers can put out simple crypto features in hours, which used to take weeks. It's still not clear if it can be as simple to use as Arbitrum's EVM setup.
Even though the 65,000 daily users show the network is being used, Starknet still has much less TVL than Arbitrum and Optimism. Getting more users remains their main challenge. If Starknet becomes the go-to solution for scaling Ethereum, it's likely that users will start using it more and more.
So Did Validity Rollups Just Win Ethereum's Scaling War?
Ethereum's plan for scaling always counted on rollups to manage most user actions. The big question was which kind would win: optimistic or validity-based.
Starknet is planning to roll out updates by March 5, 2026, to speed up transactions, change how its governance works, and tweak its token system. Bitcoin staking on Starknet went from nothing to over 1,700 BTC (around $160 million) in just three months. That BTC value is more than the $100M in staked STRK. Bitwise submitted its application for a strk token ETF around the end of December 2025, which got institutions looking closely at Starknet's basic tech. Currently, 400 million STRK tokens are staked, which is about 8% of all tokens.
STRK is trading just slightly above its all-time low right now and might drop further. The price dropped after tokens were unlocked during a weak market, which made things worse. But the data still says the same thing: a validity rollup handling actual transactions at good prices with proven finality.
Starknet isn't where it planned to be based on its initial goals. The outage in January and downtime in September 2025 support that idea. But here's the thing that Starknet's critics don't want to admit: the tech already works for the people who use it. The chain holds $302 million in total value locked, with $248 million in stablecoins, yet the Starknet token market cap sits at just $220 million. It seems like this token is underpriced, maybe because people don't fully understand how useful validity proofs are for blockchain tech. No matter who's wrong, the fix will be big.
