The Starknet’s Catalyst program aims to give previously developed initiatives on the network about 20 million Starknet (STRK) tokens from the Starknet Foundation.
An announcement shared with Cointelegraph states that the Starknet Foundation will allocate Starknet tokens valued at around $25.2 million to the twenty-one highest-performing initiatives in the ecosystem as part of its new Catalyst program.
The program has been selected to honor the most effective user-facing protocols based on various criteria analyzed jointly by an independent third party and the Stark Foundation, according to Starknet Foundation CEO Diego Oliva. Oliva communicated with Cointelegraph:
“We looked at a range of metrics with varying weights such as Total Value Locked, Fees Generated, Active Users, External Funding, Security Audits as well as several other metrics.”
The objective of the grants program is to expedite the development of Starknet’s zero-knowledge rollup technology-based Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution. The grants shall be allocated into two distinct categories: emergent projects expanding upon the network and advanced-stage projects.
Ekubo, a token launch platform; AVNU, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange; Influence, a fully on-chain grand strategy game; Realms, an on-chain gaming universe; Nostra, a DeFi protocol incorporating an imminent crypto super app; and ZKX, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange, are the initial six highest-performing projects that were eligible to receive the grants.
Web3 gaming remains one of the most prominent emergent use cases for Starknet, and the network will persist in constructing transaction-free, high-speed infrastructure to support this purpose. As stated by Oliva:
“Starknet has rolled out and will continue to roll out a series of upgrades focused on improving transaction speeds, reducing latency and transaction costs. This benefits on-chain games as well as DeFi applications, which is another group of applications that are seeing a lot of success of Starknet.”
Oliva anticipates that in addition to gaming and decentralized financing (DeFi), the grants program will inspire additional innovative blockchain use cases on the network.
L2beat reports that Starknet is the seventh-largest Ethereum layer 2 with a 2.32% market share and a total value sealed TVL of over $1.08 billion. In cumulative TVL, Ethereum layer-2 networks contain more than $46 billion.
The launch of the new developer funding program coincides with the Starknet Foundation’s announcement of a $5 million seed grants program three weeks ago. That program provided a “final push” to assist final-stage projects in launching on Starknet by awarding USD 25,000 Coin to at least 200 promising teams.
Additionally, the Starknet Foundation is devising strategies for forthcoming grant initiatives that align with the structure of the Catalyst program.
