Bankless - The Culture of Starknet with Abdel Bakhta

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

Today, we have a classic LayerZero style episode with nonother than Abdel Bakhta. Abdel is the Head of Ecosystem at Starkware and is onboarding new species to  the Least Aligned L2, Starknet. We cover the origins of Starkware and how its culture has evolved, there’s also a ton of Starkware Project Alpha on this episode so stay tuned. ---- 📣SUI | Register for Sui Basecamp https://bankless.cc/sui-basecamp  ------ 🎧 Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player:  https://bankless.cc/Podcast  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo    🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku    🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  💸 CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | USE CODE BANK30 https://bankless.cc/CTC  —— TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Intro 4:01 Abdel’s Background 11:12 Starkware Beginnings 14:59 Ethereum Alignment Meme 17:53 Starkware Culture Evolution 26:19 Getting to Decentralization 35:32 The Starknet Playbook 39:50 The Stark Dads 47:21 What’s Next 52:38 The Starknet Mafia 57:09 Abdel Focus Areas 1:01:00 Closing Thoughts------ RESOURCES Abdel Bakhta https://twitter.com/dimahledba  Starkware https://starkware.co/   Starknet https://www.starknet.io/en   ------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures  

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of Starknet. Today on the show, if you ever remember listening to my older episodes, which I called Layer Zero episodes, no, not Layer Zero, the bridge, layer Zero, the fact that all of these Layer 1s are supported by humans, supported by people, supported by tribes and cultures. That's what we call the Layer Zero here on Bankless. And today we are exploring the Layer Zero of Starknet. I had on Abdel, Abdel.dell.dark, it's his green name, from the Starknet Starkware community. and we just talked a little bit about what it means to be inside of the Starknet community. Who are these people? What is the vibe of the tribe? Why did people come to plant their settlement, settle into the world of Starknet? And then also what is exciting in the world of Starknet.

This spawned out of the conversation that I had with Abdel on Twitter after I made a tweet that I shot from the hip calling Starknet the least aligned Ethereum layer to. I explain what I mean by that. here in this episode, but it's not as it seems. It was an errant tweet, I'll call it, and we unpacked that a little bit here on the show today. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Abdel from Starknet. But first, before we get into that conversation, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Cracken knows crypto. Cracken's been in the crypto game for over a decade. And as one is the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Cracken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be.

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So this is the first time that we've ever connected. And it's been a while since I've done one of these, like layer zero type episodes. But these have always been in search of the spirit of communities, the spirit behind why people resonate with some of the systems that they find themselves in in crypto. And so today I kind of want to explore the Starkware, Starknet. Starkers, Starkers? What would you call the people that vibe with the Stark tribe? Yeah, actually, I don't think we have a common name.

We have a group of a telegram group where we have most of the builders, which is called Cairo Carostars. But that's pretty much it. I don't think we have name. We should fix that. If you have some suggestions, yeah. Maybe it'll emerge sometime during this episode. Cairo Co-Stars, what was it?

Yeah, Cairo Corstars, yeah. Right, because Cairo is the coding language for StarKite, right? Yeah, right, yeah. Maybe tell us a little bit about yourself how you came into crypto and then what sparked interest specifically in the Starkware, Starknet ecosystem. Yeah, sure. So before crypto, I was working in the fintech industry. So in a startup working on cloud-based payments, basically enabling payments,

using contactless technology on the phone, like NFC technology. So I used to say that I was working with banks before fighting them. Yes. So then I was working there. I have been working there for seven years, basically, building this payment infrastructure, working on cryptographic stuff and so on. And then in 2012, I discovered Bitcoin, playing the bit with it, like running some nose, looking at the code and whatnot.

But it was not sufficient to strike me and to say, I want to walk on this space and whatnot. So it was really in 2015 when I discovered Ethereum right before the launch. It was like a revelation to me. I was attending to a conference by Stefan Choual about Ethereum and the vision and whatnot. And it was really a revelation for me. After this conference, I had only. one idea. I wanted to work on that space and whatnot. But, you know, initially I did not want

to leave my company because I was attached to it and it was like a family company kind of. So I tried first to convince them that there was something interesting to do with blockchain and Ethereum, especially because we were already connected to the banking industry. And at this time, it was pretty rare for Web3 projects to be connected to the banking industry. So we did some experiments, but then they were not convinced for them it was a speaker. bubble. And for me, it was not. So at some point, after two years, I gave up and I decided to leave and I joined consensus, basically. So I stayed at consensus for three years, mainly working as Ethereum core developer, working on the Bezou Ethereum clients. And my main achievement was

working on EIP 1559. So I've been working on it for almost two years. I have been championing it on the technical side and working with Team Beko and client teams and whatnot. So it was very interesting because I discovered a lot of the interesting aspects, not only technical aspects, but also the governance of a decentralized protocol. And the fact that you have many different parties and they all have different interests and whatnot. Like, for example, miners were really opposed to ZCIP because it was reducing drastically their revenues. So there was a lot of pushback from big mining pools and whatnot. So I had to play with all of that, and it was super interesting because, and this is also the theme of this Layer Zero episode.

It's also all about social layer and how to align interest between different parties working together on the same protocol. So it was super interesting. So you've been very close to the code, but then also, right, like when you're so close to the code with the Ethereum Protocol especially, there's just a lot of like social interests that emerge that you need to navigate. How'd you find your way into the Starkware world? Yeah. So then after the work on the IP 1559, I was a bit exhausted, to be honest, and I had the wrong impression that I did my time on Ethereum's face. Like I had the impression that I displayed with all the different aspects and whatnot.

It was completely wrong, actually. But then at the same time, I was also a bit interested by the interoperability vision. of the cosmos ecosystem and this world where you can have different chains communicating together and so on. So I moved for a year on cosmos ecosystem, but then I had a lot of desilusions, basically, on cosmos ecosystem, mainly because of the social layer, to be clear, like the fact that there are many cosmos projects, but few of them really contribute back to the court stack and whatnot. Also, many back-to-back agreements between foundations on different chains, that end up concentrating the power and few actors in the whole ecosystem.

So I wanted to come back to the roots and come back to Ethereum. But then I thought that maybe I had a significant experience on the layer one, and I wanted maybe to do something else and help Ethereum scale. So I wanted to do something on the layer to space. So I started by doing a sort of analysis about the layer to landscape and try to play with the different technologies. and whatnot. And then my conclusion was that StarKNet was, to me, the most interesting and promising.

I was really excited about this idea of Starknet being very different. And I guess we will talk about it a lot here. But it was really something like, okay, the idea that the EVM, when it was designed, it was not designed to be ZK-friendly back in the time, of course, because the ZK space was not that evolved and whatnot. And now we have the choice between trying to make it ZK friendly or try to do something from scratch and do something optimized for this new technology that is the zero knowledge space. And I really like this idea. And ultimately, I like both ideas.

I think we need both. But I think there are two few projects trying this alternate pass. And I'm happy that Starknet is doing that. So then I started first a project building on Starknet, and then I met people from StarCWren and whatnot, and then I decided to join StarkWr to work on Starknet, basically. Beautiful. And you've been watching, like, the progress of the Starcware, Starknet, StarkX ecosystem. So you kind of have been there, at least witnessing from the beginning, right?

No, not from the beginning. Not too far after the beginning of Starknet itself. But, yeah, yeah, like two years ago. So it was really at the beginning of Starknet, yeah. Yeah. From my perspective in Ethereum, the Stark, starting with Starkware and some of the Stark X at chains, right? And this is kind of where Starkware really got its footprint with its Stark X product that DYDX uses or used. So Rare uses.

They're like generalized chains, but they're made by these one specific companies to serve their specific purpose. right so dy dx was the first derivatives platform um on on ethereum and they used the stark x uh technology kind of like app specific at d y d y x x x oh jesus app specific chain and there's a few other these right and so this is where like kind of stark where got its footprint got its foundation started like growing a little bit and like it was always to me in the very beginning it was always in stark contrast to uh some of the slower uh projects that were growing on layer two is the which at the time was optimism and arbitram because like stark stark where we kind of beat everyone to the punch when it came to like the layer two scaling philosophy but it was also like you said it was

uh who just not not interested in the evm because the evm couldn't serve its purposes so i've always thought like starkware was like pretty distant away from like ethereum because it had its own culture its own vibe like optimism and arbitram were fighting about like who's more ethereum aligned who's more EVM equivalent. And then Starkware is like, F all that. Like we are, I've always called like Starkware as in like they are Stark maxis. They're about Stark's. They want to express Starks.

And they don't really want to bring in any of the Ethereum baggage, which like optimism and Arbitrum are competing over. And they just want to like build Starks. That's kind of how I've illustrated what the Stark net ecosystem, Starkware ecosystem, kind of like where it started from. How do you reflect on that? Yeah, it's funny and very interesting, actually. It reminds me of the discussions we had on Twitter that initiated this discussion about

Starknet being the least aligned Ethereum L2. And why it's funny for me specifically, because I'm literally the one who is pushing a lot about the importance of Ethereum alignment. So now we use it as a meme because to be serious, I really believe the Ethereum alignment is important, actually. but I just believe that we don't have the correct definition of the

Ethereum alignment. I mean, it's impossible to have a universal common definition of it. But in my opinion, for example, specifically, the execution engine should not be part of something that is important for the Ethereum alignment. Even more, on the contrary, I think it's risky to consider that

the EVM compatibility is an important criteria for Ethereum alignment because it would kill completely innovation and it would be potentially a system risk if everyone is doing ZKVM and it happens that there is a big issue that we don't see right now it would be a systemic risk for Ethereum

because Atterium adopts a whole upcentric roadmap. So I believe the Ethereum alignment is very important but there are some aspects like that that I don't consider part of the Ethereum alignment. For example, I'm more attached to the philosophical alignment, basically

the core values and principles of Ethereum and whatnot. Obviously, economic alignment is important. And on that, you mentioned something also that it will be interesting to see how the token will play because it will be the first fee token that is not it. That I agree can be a bit disturbing from the point of view of the economical alignment. But to me, the most important thing is to pay the security budget of Ethereum and settle on Ethereum and use it as DA layer and whatnot. So, yeah. yeah so like this is uh this conversation for listeners kind of started on on twitter when i sent out like

people probably listeners know i shoot from the hip on twitter um and i said like stark start it's going to be interesting to see stark net like a not less ethereum aligned layer two which i think everyone kind of interpreted as they saw fit uh and which was my mistake because i left that very much up to interpretation back in the early days when we had like arbitrum and optimism and starkware stark net. Like Starknet, like I said, was just like the most distant in terms of the technology was distant. The culture was like it was attracted a different set of builders. And like I said, it was Stark Maxis, like Stark's the cryptography primitive. And then also was interested in using Stark as the gas token. And like if we rewind the clock and go back to like 2020, this was so

incredibly divergent from like what we were familiar with with optimism and arbitrage. Right. And then now we fast forward to today and like now those differences seem so trivial and small and marginal because like what is like Ethereum misaligned has really like expanded into like some like absolute BS. But like it was a little bit of a when I like sent out that tweet and then got that pushback from the stark net ecosystem. It was like what the hell are you talking about David where we are feel very Ethereum aligned. I was just like oh yeah really the evolution of the conversation of Ethereum alignment has really moved on from just like not being EVM equivalent. and not using ethas gas.

Now there's like a much different part of this spectrum. So that's like kind of where my like perspective was coming from. Yeah, yeah. And now we use this meme a lot and we play with it. It's even in my view, you know, we also use some emoji to to symbolize the least aligned meme and whatnot. So thank you for that because it's a powerful meme. Wait, this turned into a meme? Yeah, yeah, yeah, really.

Yeah, yeah, really. The whole like my least aligned. Exactly. It turned into a meme. Yeah. Yeah. What's the emoji? The emoji is a compass for the alignment and the decreasing chart, like to show that the alignment is decreasing.

Yeah, yeah. I have it in my Twitter round on and many people on Stacknet ecosystem as well. Because I tweeted that. Yeah. Oh, my God. Okay. For the record, complete, like, not necessarily misunderstanding, but just like very poor communication and an incomplete idea being expressed from like pulled forward a vibe like four years ago that, yeah, that came in.

When you bring forward like Ethereum alignment from 2020, 2020, 24, things don't translate. Yeah, no, but let me be clear. There is no heart feelings or whatnot. We just think that it's a good way, actually, to show the difference of Starknet and play with it because people then can question whether or not we are serious when we say that, and then it can lead to interesting discussion. So there is no heart feelings. It's a good meme, actually.

Right. Okay. Okay. but I also do want to get into like the shared identity, like I said at the beginning, of the Starkwarians, Starknettians, Starkers, because there is like a cultural difference between some of the, I don't know what you would call

like the Ethereum vibe. It's very diverse, but like maybe some, I don't know, kumbaya Gronola people of the Ethereum Layer 1. And then there's like the Starkers who are like, you know, pretty damn serious people. really into what the projects that they're building, really into the expansion of Starks. And like sometimes you can just like,

I'll be talking to somebody at a conference and I'll be like, I'll get kind of a vibe. Like, oh yeah, you're a Starkware person. Like I can, there's like a shared identity there. Can you like do your best to try and describe this in words? Like what would you say is the identity of Starcware? Yeah, definitely. And I think that part of it is related to the technical design choices actually.

Like, for example, I think really that the not. EVM compatibility played a big role in shaping this shared identity on the Stocknet ecosystem. I will try to explain why. First of all, I think it's by default, it makes builder in a mood where they think out of the box more naturally. Okay. Also, it's kind of a filter of motivation, kind of why? Because, you know, there is no point in learning a new language and whatnot if you don't want to build something meaningful. because if you just want to do a low-quality copy pasta of something else,

you can just take an EVM project and deploy it on so many EVM chains. So I think it acts also as a motivation filter, and people want to do meaningful stuff and also disruptive stuff, like stuff that are very special and unique. We see a concrete element, I think, that we have probably younger people on average than on Ethereum. We have a lot of very young builders that are very interested by some verticals that are uniquely enabled by Starknet or more powerful on Stacknet. For example, on Chain Gaming is one of just one on Stocknet that is very developed. And we have a lot of very young builders that really like on chain gaming and want to push the frontier of what we can do onchain.

And they understood that the power of the Cairo Virtual Machine can really unleash this potential. So we have a big project. I know you are familiar with it, but it's dojo. They are building an on-chain gaming engine. So it's the equivalent of mud on optimism ecosystem. And we have a lot of builders who think out of the boss naturally, I would say. And they really understood that with those new primitives, they can explore a new area. And they are not trying to copy past something that they see elsewhere.

usually they tend to more naturally innovate and do some crazy stuff, like for example, AI on chain. Like we have a project called Giza. They are doing machine learning inference on chain using Cairo and whatnot. So I think this is one property that we have on Stalk Met ecosystem. I think also by default they are very much attached to very core and low-level tech. And you know, back in the days, the Cairo stack and the starkness stack was very hard.

Basically, it was very low level. The tooling was not great and whatnot. And I think somehow it shapes the builders in the ecosystem because they had to play with that and find different ways to conciliate with this new and young ecosystem that is liking a lot of tooling. So they had to first to be patient and to try to overcome those difficulties and whatnot. So, yeah, I think it helped a lot to shape this shared identity. One of the things that I thought was immensely interesting,

when I went to the Starkware sessions in Tel Aviv in February of last year, 2023, it was in the very early days of kind of the Starknet independence from Starkware. Like the community and builders that had been building on Starkware and, like, using Starks and, like, learning about Cairo, and then saw, like, StarkNet as a thing. I think there was test nets up and running so people were building, and just getting their teeth sharpened. They were also coming to the realization of,

oh, we are the early people in Starknet. This thing is going to be placed on our shoulders. And now I'm not just a dev anymore. Now I'm like a community steward of something greater than myself. Exactly. I'm also, I'm very close to the governance conversations. There was a governance workshop where people like literally sat in a circle like cross-legged and talked about like what governance will look like.

like for Starknet moving forward. There were a few community volunteers who had a volunteer to be part of the Starknet Foundation to be liaisons with the Starknet community. And it was like, hey, guys, this is like up to us. And nowhere, and I don't really think anywhere, anyone that I recognize from Starkware were there, like, stewarding those conversations. I think Starkware did a fantastic job of finding the right people, elevating them and say, hey, you are community members. You are also leaders. shepherd everyone. And then they're like, okay, sure, I don't know what that looks like. I need to go figure it out with everyone else. And so in addition to the very technically competent, like, low level builders that you were talking about, there was also, this was a year ago now,

there was also this like emerging realization of like there is this massive network that is going to be owned by us. And people will all, we're all coming to learn about like what that meant for them. It's like, oh, I'm not just a developer. I'm now also like a governor, a steward of this thing. And that was my vibe, the vibe check that I got like last February, so a year ago. And now like Starknet is an alive ecosystem. The Starknet token is dropped. It's out there in the wild now.

It's not actually at the time of recording, but it will be when this goes live. Maybe you could like talk about the maturation, the progress, the evolution of the community around Starknet over the last year or so. Like how has that formed? Definitely. So what you said is completely true. They are really involved a lot in the governance of the protocol and they are participating a lot in the lifecycle of the network. Another example is that last summer we did a special assembly.

So there were 40 builders gathered together in Paris in the castle. We spent three days literally all together discussing about many aspects of stock nets, including technical aspects, including governance, including the values and whatnot. Ethereum alignment, actually, we discussed, we had a specific session about Ethereum alignment and so on. And it was amazing to see those people all together committing three days of their lives coming from different countries in the world, all together united by a common goal. And it's true that they are very much involved in that.

And it's more and more the case. like there are more committees in the foundation and people from the committee are really shepherding those like we have a gaming committee, we have a defy committee, we have people working on governance and all aspects and I think also related to what we said before because you know everything had to be built from scratch no one was afraid of building something that was missing

and it ended up that we have very dense diverse stack, basically, by far the most diverse among all AL2s. Like we have five different full nodes implementations, three proeuvre, three sequencers, four different implementations of the Cairo Virtual Machine. And it's huge, actually, to have this level of decentralization of the stack so early were on all different L layer two because they can leverage already existing pieces on So it's not that they become lazy, but by default, you know, they have something they can use. Where on Starnet, you have to build everything from scratch, RPC infrastructure, everything, tooling, compilers and whatnot.

And so naturally, we have now a very diverse stack. Beautiful, yeah. And I think when we look back on the history of crypto, like the maturation and development and growth of the Starknet ecosystem will just be like an insane case study of how. how to spawn a network. I don't think really we will get like opportunities like this very often just to even watch this thing. Can you talk a little bit about just like how that decentralization process was able to be achieved over the last like one or two years?

Like community, like first you had a community, which was like already a huge advantage. But also like by the leadership of, you know, people inside of the Starknet, StarCware ecosystem, the community was like empowered and like you know given responsibility and which they accepted and then also i think this is true so correct me if i'm wrong but like stark tokens have actually been like distributed among community members over the last like year or so selectively like very precisely granularly uh and that was also kind of aided in this story and like shown the community members like hey you actually will own this thing um even before the token is actually like out there. Maybe you can talk a little bit, like illustrate some of this conversation. Yeah, yeah,

definitely. So I think so the process of the decentralization was pretty gradual, I would say. But one of the, it's true that the initial kernel of the community played a very important role because it was so small at the beginning and everyone was, everyone knew each other and whatnot. So when you come, you have directly some human interaction. And it's, you have directly some human interaction. and it's very important actually it makes a big difference. It's not only about reading some tutorials to Lauren Cairo. You had the opportunity to really talk to people,

to meet them in person, to participate in hacker houses and stuff like that. And I think one thing we did great is to consolidate in few places first before scaling too fast. Like, for example, we had very strategic places like in France, for example, where we have a very strong kernel

of very loyal and committed builders. So it started with something like five people, then 10, 20, and then we stayed at this size for quite like six months or so. And then they were really close to each other, et cetera. And then it was really easier when we brought more people in the ecosystem. They had direct interactions with the community, and they saw that the community was special. And it was not only about StarCware or the foundation,

but also about the network of humans working together on the same goal. So not scaling too fast, I think, was. played a big role and trying to focus on few areas first before expanding in many different places at the same time. And then naturally the community, because initially it was small and they were close to each other, they played a big role. And we included them in all decision processes, basically to gather feedback for what they needed, what were their pain points and what not. We created, for example, a team that I'm leading, which is the exploration team. And the goal of this team is to start some open-source projects and to work hand in hand with the community

on those projects. And we pay them. So they contribute. And each time they do contribution to a project, they get paid. So, and the goal is, first of all, to eat our own dog food. So it's always better when you use your actual stack to understand the paint of the builders and and understand what they need and whatnot. And then it's also a good way to have some retention in the ecosystem because, you know, it's not about just having a one-time grant and then you do something, but then you need to find a job. You need to eat something, basically.

And with this system, they can stay in the ecosystem, improve their skills, continue to sharpen their skills and learn on actual projects. And then once they are ready, they can either find a job or create their own project and whatnot. Plus, those projects, the goal is at some point to give ownership to the community. Like, for example, the first one that we created is Cacarrot, which is the ZKVM built in Cairo. So it was an exploration project. And then people from the community were actively involved in that.

And then we discussed with them and they wanted to take the lead on the project. So we gave them the ownership. We helped them to do a seed round. And for example, and Stark were also invested in the seeds, Vitalik as well. And now the project is fully autonomous and fully owned by the community members and whatnot. So I think also this is something that helps because we really focus on giving them, on power them and making sure that they can stay and live comfortably on Stocknet. Because we don't want, stack net is already a bet because it's not EVM compatible.

Do you need to learn language? So we don't want to accumulate the layers of risks for them. So we try to make their lives easier. And regarding the distribution of the token, so actually it was pretty recently that we did ECMP programs to reward early community members of the community. So for a very long time, there was not even tokens involved. They did not know that it would happen at some point. So it was not even a big driver, to be honest, surprisingly. It came almost as a surprise and a bonus.

And of course, everyone is happy now. But it was not, it's the cherry on the peak, but it was not a main driver for them, surprisingly. Maybe also because actually somehow the fact that, you know, I guess almost no one knows that we had for a long time a grand program because we don't communicate, we don't even communicate about it. It was really strategic one-to-one grants to do something specific. And it was at the human scale. Like you had to do one call with Louis, who was doing this and what. not so and we did not over communicate about that so it was pretty organic you know people again it was also a filter of motivation we identified people like for example people active on

discord on asking good questions etc actively reaching out to them and checking if they wanted to do something and propose them a grant so yeah i think also did this help a lot mantel formerly known as bit dow is the first dow led web3 ecosystem all built on top of mantel's first first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand new high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayers data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all

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Make taxes this year easy and affordable with crypto tax calculator. Sign up at cryptotaxcalculator.io and get a 30% discount with code Bank 30. Click the link in the show notes for more information. I think this has been one of the biggest advantages that Starknet has had, which is that it hasn't necessarily needed to broadcast its asks, right? like, hey, there's a grant program come and collect the grant. Exactly. Has it needed to market that because there are people very proximate to Starknet who is like,

oh, like, I'll take that. I'll run with that. Like, don't you don't need to broadcast that. I'm like right here. I'm already listening. You don't need to market this, right? Like, I'll just go and do it. And like, yeah, like any single project would just kill to have that kind of like community

so proximate to them. If there was like a textbook written about the Starknet strategy over the last like two years, for strategy, for growth, strategy for like community adoption. What would you say were like would be some of the most elements, is the most important elements that would be in that book? Like what are the big like wins here? First I would say focus on quality rather than quantity.

Don't try to scale too fast. Again, I think take time to have a very strong organic kernel for the community that will then help you to snowball and to gather more people. Embracing our differences also, I would say. We have this motto in Starknet, which is Keep Starknet Strange. It's actually the name of the GitHub organization of my exploration team. It's called Keep Starknet Strange. That was a Van Spencer line, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So embracing our differences and not trying to stimulate a copy past culture. And like, for example, stimulate people who have really crazy ideas. something that almost everyone will say it will never work or it's crazy dumb. We never said these kind of things. We say, oh, wow, that's pretty cool.

Please do it. We will help you. And we don't know what it will bring, but please do it. So, yeah, embracing the differences. Stimulate the open source culture early and also the synergies between projects. This is something that played well, I think, because we know everyone. It was like a family. So it was really easy to identify potential synergies between two projects.

You know someone is working on an Oracle. You know a different project that needs an Oracle. You connect them. They work together and the whole ecosystem grow. Yeah. Identifying and stimulate synergies between the projects. Accepting and embracing healthy competition, I would say. I think it was a very smart move from Uri to directly have two wallets.

Argent and Bravo's competing each other instead of just funding one big initiative. I think this stimulation was very healthy and I think without Bravo's coming, Argent would not be there yet

because they had to really differentiate themselves, innovate, keeping adding features and whatnot. The focus on the diversity very early was very important because it helps to attract

also different sets of developers. We have a very diverse stack. We have Rust, Z, Go, TypeScript and whatnot. So it helps also to attract people. Because again, we don't want people to necessarily learn Cairo to be able to contribute meaningfully to Starknet. All the infrastructure is built without Cairo. So you can definitely contribute to Starknet

without learning Cairo as a starting point. few organic regions, regions first, geographical regions. And then also I think that we did pretty good job. Once we had this strong kernel in Europe, we expanded to, I would say, emerging countries like Latam and Africa. Those are very strategic places that we try to expand right now. And I think that also those regions, they understand more naturally the need of crypto. It's not just about the tech, but they live in countries where they see the importance of crypto and they see what happens where you cannot trust your government or central banks and whatnot. So a very big part of StarkNet, obviously, are the Stark Dads, Ellie and Erie.

Can you talk a little bit about just like their parenting, their parenting styles, the effect that they've had, the vacuums that they've left either unintentionally or intentionally. just talk about like the parenting styles of these two father figures. So those two father figures are very different and very complementary. So it was very amazing. So on one hand, you have Ellie, who is really the gigabrain figure of StarCware, like the inventor of stocks and the genius of Matt and whatnot. So I think the Ellie brings naturally this natural charisma and technical legitimacy credibility of StarCware and Stocknet.

While you have Uri, who is more focused on the operational side of things and also connecting humans, I think Uri was amazing in connecting the dots between people, and also understand the business needs and how the operational aspect and the execution was super important. like Uri is really someone. It's impressive how close he is to all builders in the ecosystem. Literally, he knows almost every single one of them. He spent time during events in person to discuss with everyone to give them advice on the business front and whatnot.

So really, Uri played an amazing role in that. And even for me personally, he was one of the main reason why I joined Stockware. Like, for example, I can give a small anecdote. So I was hesitating between two different options. And I discussed a lot in person with Uri. And I really, I was impressed by something that might be trivial. But he said, okay, if you join Starkware, we would want you to come to Israel and visit us at the office.

But he directly thought that there might be some sensitivity for me. and he said, but of course, if this is something for context because I'm Muslim, this is why I'm saying that. And he understood that it could be something sensible for me. It was not actually, but it could have been. And I really admired the fact that it was not only about, you know, professional relationship, but always about the human beings behind those. And again, the social layer.

So he is really someone amazing on that front. He has such a great level of. empathy and whatnot. And it's really because when people who don't know Uri would not think that from him, when you see him like that, I'm pretty sure that people think he's a distant CEO or whatnot, but it's clearly not the case. He's really close to almost every single builder in the ecosystem and whatnot. So he had to unfortunately step down by personal family issues.

So I'm still very sad about it, to be honest. I really love worry but I think he was very brave in taking this decision because you know he could have just want to keep this option open depending on

the future we don't know but he knew that it was potential risk for the company and the ecosystem so he took the brave decision to step down definitively and I think it was admirable by the way I also lost

control after his announcement because I saw some very inhuman reactions to this announcement, like people not caring at all about his personal situation and asking about the air drop and saying very inhuman stuff. And I lost control, to be honest.

It was one of the few times where I lost control on Twitter. It escalated, actually. I don't know if you saw, but I used the word eBayga and now it became something big like a meme and I got a lot of insults and death threats because of that.

But anyway, sometimes it reminds me that we are human and also we have emotions and sometimes it's hard to keep control on all circumstances. So, yeah. I mean, I totally understand, especially when Ellie and Erie have created such a human level connection between the inside of the Starkware, Starknet culture and then someone else is coming in, not being sensitive to like reminding,

not being reminded that there's a human on the other end of the conversation and obviously just being there for themselves. Like the airdrop farmers, theirdrop grifters are just rampant in the space. And I consider them fodder. The human side can come out. But when when like everyone is just like sounding exactly the same as theirdrop, theirdrop hunters who don't really have any other interests in the space, I consider them not worth listening to. There are better ways to contribute to the conversation. I totally understand. As father figures, like, there's both the role of, like, being high touch with the child

that is darknet. And then there's also being, like, leaving it up to his own devices and stepping back and seeing what happens. Can you talk about any of these experiences or, like, their role or strategy with that? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's an important aspect. And it's hard, to be honest, like, to give the baby to both the community and to a foundation.

so they had to hire some people to lead the foundation, like J-Go, the CEO's the foundation and whatnot. So I think it was not an easy process, but I'm very happy that they understood that it was so important for the long-term success of Starknet to decentralize early the governance and to have also some forces outside of stockware and to see stockware as one of the core contributor of Starknet, but not the only one,

and to focus on bringing more strong partners that will play a big role in Starknet development. But, yeah, it's not something easy, and it creates some friction. And to be honest, it slowdowns things also because you need to involve more parties in the discussions. You cannot decide everything unilaterally. But it's on purpose, of course,

but it creates some friction. And I think that, for example, some of our competitors, they don't have this overhead. They can decide everything unilaterally. They have the full control on their protocol and their stack. Like for example, for us, when we do a network upgrade, we need to wait until all full nodes are ready, RPC providers, indexers and whatnot.

And we don't develop those. So we are also coupled to the roadmap of external parties and whatnot. So I think it's good and healthy for the network because it's much more resilient and you have more gradual. that can say if something is going wrong and whatnot. But it comes with the price, the price of the velocity of the development of the protocol. But I think credible neutrality is super important

and that Ellie and Ory understood it well with the creation of the foundation and empowering people in the community and strong partners working with us on Starknet. What are the Starkware and Starknettian Starkers? What are they currently excited about? Obviously, there's this very big event that we are all processing, but really just beyond that, there's like a long future ahead.

This is really just the beginning. What are people excited about? What are they building? What are they focusing on? What's most exciting in the Starknet ecosystem? Yeah. So I think there are multiple tracks. I would say the fee reduction track, the performance track, and also the more features track and more unique features.

So of course the coming things and it will be out also when the video will be there but the integration of 4844 with the next Ethereum upgrade that will reduce fees and actually we are pretty bullish and confident about that

why because of our proving technology like once you remove the cost of the DA like if 4844 works well then what will matter most is the verification cost of the proof because right now you know

the ratio is something like 95% of the cost is DA. And 5% only is the profilification. So it's negligible right now. So our strengths of Cairo and that is not visible a lot right now. But once DA is not a problem anymore, it will be the case. So we are pretty confident that we will have a very competitive fees after 4844. then there is people are excited about volition

which is something that will be pretty unique I think in Starknet which will be the ability for smart contract developers to choose their DA layer on a very granular level so it won't be binary it won't be either you are Validium or you are a roll-up you can choose

on a very granular level to put some data and use Ethereum as DA and for some others you can use off-chain DA or Celestia or Avail and whatnot so it will be super powerful and I think it can bring new kinds of applications where, depending on the security level, you will choose between different kinds of DA, but even in the same application, I don't know, but for example, if you have some NFT, you want to put some important on-chain metadata,

and you want to use Ethereum DA, but for some of them, you don't care, and then you can use extra alt-DA solutions. A lot of people are very excited about native local comp abstraction, that is again something very unique to Stocknet. It's the only network where you have only native account abstraction. There are few other networks where you have some icon abstraction, like on ZKSync, but you also have EOA. And actually you have more because you have EOA, you have 43-37 account abstraction plus their native account abstraction.

So in terms of it creates some fraction in terms of UX and DevX for application developers. When Stacknet, you don't have the choice. You have only native account abstraction. So people are excited and trying to implement a very cool showcase of the power of native account abstraction. Like we have people who implemented some smart contracts where you can interact with them unlocking your face ID. Because you can literally implement whatever authentication logic you want in your contract. It's flexible in the protocol. So we see a lot coming in terms of paymaster use cases, social finance use cases.

We have a lot of people bullish and excited about cross-examination. over between farcaster frames and Starknet. We see already a lot of Starknet builders building cool Starknet related frames. And then there is an ongoing topic which is performance. People on Starknet because they are really excited

about optimizations and stuff like that. So one notable example will be this year of the integration of KO native, which is something that will bring a huge boost on the sequencer speed. Basically, you can see it as completely removing the overhead of having

a virtual machine and you will execute everything like it was directly a binary program on the node. You can do that on the sequencer because you don't have to prove the execution. On the prover, of course you cannot. But anyway, this is a huge performance improvement that is coming and that will again unlock a lot of things. And last example, I would say is app chains and layer three. We recently announced the implementation of Kio Verifier, which will effectively enable the creation of stack net layer 3s and use the

fractal scaling thesis that we have pushed for the past years. Again, we are pretty different. It seems the industry is moving towards

horizontal L2s. Like you have polygon with aggregated layer thesis. The OP stack is like that also. And for the moment, it seems that we are

the only network will put a strong emphasis on the fractal scaling thesis. So we'll be exciting to see how it plays. But I'm pretty bullish on layer trees.

and app chains in general, because I think they will bring a lot of new features and innovative use cases. And you can see them also as canary networks for the public stock net itself, because you can experiment faster. Similarly to layer two can experiment faster than the layer one, you can have that on one layer above. So I'm very excited about that and builders in the ecosystem as well. That's a lot of surface area for sure. There's a lot of things to touch on. One thing I've definitely been noticing is people came into the crypto ecosystem via Starknet, via Starkware, and that's kind of where they grew, their foundation and the identity learned how to be a coder in Web3 and crypto, learned what that

meant. And now these people have moved on from just being like hackers hacking on projects at hackathons to like starting to actually like, oh, I want to commit to one idea and have that be my business, have that be my startup, have that be my career. And so like there's a growing Starknet mafia out there of people who have just been there. They are now no longer amateurs of Cairo, they are now experts of Cairo. And now at the same time, Starknet is maturing into this ecosystem that's self-sufficient. So are the builders on top of it. Can you talk about just this arc of the Cairo builders and where they are pointing

their efforts towards? Like, what are the kind of class of startups that you're seeing being born around the Starknet world? Yeah, I really saw the maturation of many of them, like starting exactly like you said, building some cool stuff on Hackathon projects and very, very, crazy idea. And then they went through the process of learning and being experts and whatnot and having some projects idea and going into production grade mode and whatnot. So I really saw many of them grow and it was very impressive. And really, again, a lot of very young builders,

like 19 years old founder who are building crazy projects and whatnot. So now I think it's It's really a transition phase where we have the first cycle of very major builders that are now experts in Cairo and have the possibility to run an actual business product on top of Stocknet. So this is the first wave of actual products that we see in production that are very interesting. To name few of them, I would name Avenue, which is the biggest dex aggregator on Stocknet. And it has a very smooth UX and whatnot. So people start to compare it more and more to Jupiter on Solana in terms of the smooth UX and whatnot. And they are very shipping and they are very good in execution.

Now they are working on very innovative features like gasless trading infrastructure using Playmaster or stuff like that. We have Ekubo. But Ekubo is a bit an exception because it was already an OG. So it's Moody from Uniswap. and he left Uniswap to create the project on Stocknet. And he started a Kubo, which is an IMM, Univore an IMM-like model with extensions and whatnot. So it's very powerful IMM. If I'm not mistaken, it should be the most capital-efficient IMM in the whole crypto industry.

We have a very cool innovative projects, again, around AI and machine learning like GISA. And by the way, it's an interesting example because it's an example. of some projects that are using the Stocknet stack, but not strongly coupled to the public stocknet. Like, they can use the stack outside of the public stocknet. Another example is Dojo. They are building games and you can deploy on stocknet, but they are working also on layer trees on top of the OP stack, basically.

Being able to have a Stocknet app chain game that will settle on OP stack, basically. So it's also an interesting aspect that StarCware really understood that for adoption, it was important that Cairo itself and the stack is not strongly coupled to stack. You can use the stack and use it elsewhere. I think it's a good move for adoption and awareness of the language on language

is the state and the stack and we haven't tried to lock people to use Cairo on stocknet. Also maybe another example which is in the real world asset vertical, which is carbonable working on the carbon industry, like

not focusing on the carbon credits market, but more on the supply, like basically tokenizing projects themselves, like real world projects that will produce some carbon credits over 20 years or something like that. And they tokenize the process of the issuance of the carbon credits and whatnot. And then they can build derivatives based on that and defy protocol using those projects. Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful.

And Abdul, I mean, there's a lot going on in the, the Starknet ecosystem. What are you focused on? Like when we're done with this podcast, you're going to go back to work. What does that look like? What's on your near-term goals? My near-term goals, of course, I will start new exploration projects. So there are a few areas that I want to explore. One of them is account obstruction. I want really to find very disruptive use cases to showcase it. Really something that will be uniquely enabled by Starknet and the native accliction. So I have a few ideas I want to explore. maybe to try to do some kind of on-chain neobank-like experience,

like where you have a vault and you can create some custom accounts with custom spending limits or different types of particularities like that, but in very smooth manner. I want to really leverage contact abstraction for this. I'm also focusing a lot now on the ecosystem front because I'm now taking the head of the ecosystem. So I'm currently hiring a new team for the ecosystem. By the way, if you know some very good people who would be a good fit, let me know.

So I want to find new strategies to do what we did actually at scale. Because you know what all the playbook I explained before, it's not really something easy to scale, to be honest. It worked at a very small, medium scale to bootstrap the organic kernel. but if we want now to 100x or 1,000x the ecosystem, it won't work. We cannot use the same playbook because it involves a lot of human interactions, like doing 15 calls a day and whatnot. So now I'm trying to think about how to scale this at a way bigger scale. And also I want to work more now also with existing projects in other ecosystems.

because we have now, I would say, 95% of native Starknet projects, but it will be also important to have strong EVM Ethereum projects coming also to Starknet and even beyond Ethereum, actually. I think now my, I start to believe that in terms of developer acquisition, we should focus more maybe on non-Etherian ecosystems.

Why? Few reasons, but first of all, I think that in ecosystems like Solana, Apulka.cosmos, first of all, they already went through the step of accepting that DVM is not the endgame. They already went through the journey of learning a new stack, a new language, from scratch, etc. So they are already in this mindset of accepting

that there might be opportunities outside. So I think it can be more efficient for us to target more those deaths. I think the marginal cost of learning Cairo to deploy on one more L2 versus just deploy on 15. EVML2 is not worth it for solid DC devs, I think. So I want to put more focus on bringing non-Etherium developers.

But I'm wondering, I think for users, I think it's almost the opposite in a way, because what I'm thinking right now, but it might be wrong, is that there is no way that we can convince right now Solana users to come on Stocknet because they accepted the tradeoffs and compromises of Solana. And if you don't care sufficiently about,

about security level and decentralization of Ethereum, for you, Stacknet will always be worse than Solana, because you will say it's more expensive, it's slower and whatnot. So I think, like, at some point we can even compete with them on those levels, but not in the next two years, I would say, realistically. So for the moment, I think our main user base will be probably on Ethereum, people who care sufficiently about decentralization and security. Yeah.

Abdel, this has been fantastic. What other, like, topics or stone have I not unturned that is important to the Starknet community? One maybe topic, actually, is I want to create more bridges between our community and Ethereum community. Because, you know, it's not on purpose that we don't mix our community during events. It's just because of the nature of the tech, for example, if we participate to eat global hackathon, will have a separate Starknet track. But you know, you have the choice between competing on a 300k pool of EVM projects

versus competing on just for the Starkness specific track. So usually it was not worth it for us to... But now I want to find some ways to have more connections between Ethereum community in general and Starknet community. Also, in terms of research, research, And I want more close connection with the EF and the research on Ethereum. We actually started to do more and more like that.

I want also to push this year some EIPs. We are trying to identify some stuff that will be important for ZK roleups. And generally, you know, of course, we don't want to push EIP just for us, but for all ZKOOULUPS. And we will try to push and work more. For example, this is something that I think optimism is doing well. They are contributing a lot on the layer one. And I want us to do more like that. Yeah.

Abdel, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your perspective. I hope that the names for the Starkware, Stark Netters, can emerge because I would like to be able to use that name. Yeah, yeah. We need to find a name, definitely. Yeah. No, this has been fantastic. Abdel, thank you so much.

Thank you very much, David. Thanks for having you.