StarkWare Slashes Staff and Splits Into Two Units After Starknet Revenue Collapses 99% - Crypto Economy

TL;DR:

• StarkWare announced a restructuring with staff cuts and the creation of two independent business units to generate their own revenue.
• Starknet network revenue dropped more than 99% from its peak of nearly $6 million per month in 2023, to around $48,000 in the first half of April 2026.
• Avihu Levy, a researcher who proposed a quantum-resistant bitcoin transaction method, will lead the new applications unit.

StarkWare announced staff cuts and an internal reorganization into two independent business units, in response to the more than 99% drop in revenue from its Starknet network since the peak reached in late 2023. The changes were communicated by co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson during an all-hands meeting with employees.

Ben-Sasson explained that the company has become “simply too large” for its new strategy and that it needs to return to a startup mindset to accelerate product-market fit He did not specify the exact number of employees affected or the timeline of the process, though he confirmed that StarkWare will offer severance packages that exceed legal and contractual requirements in most jurisdictions.


Two Units, a New Direction for StarkWare

The new structure divides the company into a revenue-focused applications unit and a renewed Starknet development unit. The first will be led as general manager by Avihu Levy, current Chief Product Officer, and the second by Tom Brand, current Head of Product. Both units will have their own engineering, product, and go-to-market teams.

Levy recently published a paper on Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB), a method for making bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum attacks without modifying the protocol. The approach he proposed replaces traditional signature schemes with hash-based proofs, though it implies estimated costs of between $75 and $200 per transaction compared to approximately $0.33 for a standard bitcoin payment.


A Proposal to Protect Bitcoin

Regarding additional leadership changes at StarkWare, CFO Ran Grinshtein will take over supervision of finance, human resources, security, and IT Gideon Kaempfer, current Head of Core Engineering, will become chief architect reporting directly to Ben-Sasson. COO Oren Katz requested his departure and will remain in the role until the end of April.

The drop in Starknet revenue is partly explained by a sector-wide dynamic: Ethereum’s EIP-4844 upgrade, implemented in March 2024, drastically reduced fee revenue across all Layer 2 networks. Even so, Starknet’s TVL exceeds $200 million. Ben-Sasson noted that the goal is now to convert the company’s technological superiority into “significant revenue” through products that, in his words, “cannot be built by any other team, in any other way.”