🟢 LIVE : STRK’s L1 Bet: Eli Ben-Sasson on Starknet’s Exit Plan

The Defiant Livestream | Thursday, Oct. 15, 9:00am ET

Starknet says it is “actively considering becoming an L1” — leaving Ethereum to become what it calls the first fully quantum-resistant network, with 2027 as the target. StarkWare co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson joins Camila Russo to explain the plan.

The announcement came as a post on X on Oct. 8, with no governance proposal attached. STRK ran from $0.05 to $0.12 in five days and has since given back most of it. In the same week, StarkWare shipped Shadow Accounts, a privacy primitive that gives users a separate address per app, and launched OffMarket, a service for trading on Polymarket without linking positions to a public wallet.

We get into:

— What becoming an L1 actually means for Starknet, and what replaces Ethereum’s settlement guarantees

— Who approves the move, and when a proposal goes to governance

— Why Ben-Sasson thinks the quantum threat is “much closer than we think”

— Where he lands in the “bunker mode” fight between Justin Drake, Vitalik Buterin and Yehuda Lindell

— Why StarkWare is demoing ML-DSA signatures when Buterin named lattices as the next risk

— Shadow Accounts, OffMarket, and building privacy on a counterparty that can switch you off

— Starknet’s revenue, emissions, and whether an L1 changes the economics

Guest: Eli Ben Sasson

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