[Proposal] Incentivizing the Growth Phase of Starknet

[david]

Hi guys! This is David Garai, founder at Nostra. A brief introduction: Nostra is building the Liquidity Layer of Starknet. We are building a one-stop DeFi solution comprising three fully-integrated products: Nostra Money Market, UNO Stablecoin, and Nostra Swap.

Building on Starknet

The Starknet DeFi ecosystem is in its very early stages. The Total Value Locked (TVL) among DEXes is less than $1.5 million (Source: DeFiLlama). At the time of writing, only 14 projects are live on Starknet Mainnet and only four focus on DeFi (Source: Orbiter).

Incentive Programs on Avalanche and Optimism

There are a number of Layer 2 solutions live today competing to capture market share to become the dominant L2. Many Layer 2s and Layer 1s have successfully launched DeFi incentive programs to onboard new developers, increase user engagement, and increase TVL on-chain. Overall, these elements contribute to a healthy and growing ecosystem of activity. For example:

Avalanche: In August 2021, the Avalanche Foundation announced a $180M DeFi incentive program called Avalanche Rush to try to onboard more dApps to their growing DeFi ecosystem. As a result, the TVL on Avalanche peaked at $12.21 billion within 4 months (Source: DeFiLlama).

Optimism: 5.4% of the total initial token supply has been kept aside to be distributed among various applications built on Optimism via the Optimism Governance Fund (Source: Optimism Forum). This fund has been distributed across different phases, starting with Phase 0 in July 2022, where 25 proposals were submitted, with 24 of them receiving OP tokens (Source: Public Funding Tracking). This resulted in a relatively steady growth in TVL which remained high throughout (Source: Dune Analytics).

The incentive programs of the two chains mentioned above have been successful in terms of onboarding new developers and new users to the respective ecosystems. It’s worth noting that the fall in TVL for these blockchains was at least partially due to the general market conditions. Additionally, the transaction count and the daily active users (DAU) on Avalanche is still higher than before Avalanche Rush (Source: Avalanche Stats).

PROPOSAL - Starknet Governance Fund

There are already several proposals in place to incentivize builders on Starknet. However, the Starknet community must now think about the next growth phase with incentives targeting users.

To compete with existing L2s, we propose the Starknet Foundation launch a Starknet Governance Fund (naming TBD), an incentive program targeted at the users of the Starknet ecosystem. We believe that Starknet has a lot of potential to become the number one scaling solution for Ethereum. Setting up an incentive program will motivate talented builders to deploy and incentivize users to bridge across to Starknet and use the growing number of Starknet products. In addition to DeFi, we propose that the Selection Committee (discussed in more detail below) may also consider applications from adjacent areas such as GameFi and NFTs.

What does the Foundation need to do?

• Set aside a percentage of the total supply of $STRK tokens as incentives. For example, Optimism set aside 5.4% of the total $OP supply.

• Divide the incentive program into multiple phases/chapters.

• One optimal strategy could be to allocate ~50% of the entire incentive allocation for the next two years. Projects must apply for incentives by submitting a proposal on the Starknet governance forum.

• A separate governance proposal could be made at the end of the two-year period to determine how the remaining 50% is distributed (the program could be extended for a further five years, for example).

How would projects apply?

A project applying for the incentive program should mention details about their project, links to social media, TVL, presence on other chains, and the TVL on the respective chains.

The proposal should also include an answer to the following questions:

• What has the project done so far to build the Starknet ecosystem, promote Cairo, and onboard users?
• What is the background of the team building the products? Do they have experience building products? Have any VCs funded them?
• Why do they want to apply for the incentive program, and how will it help them and facilitate the growth of Starknet?
• Is the product audited, or when is an audit scheduled?
• The requested amount of $STRK tokens (which will be capped)
• How does the project plan to distribute these tokens?
• How long will it take to distribute the tokens?
• How will the incentives help build product market fit?
• How will they retain users once the reward distribution strategy is over?

Projects should be able to apply for the incentive program more than once. Decisions will be made based on the above criteria and the success of the previous campaign(s). Additionally, projects should have exhausted all tokens they planned to distribute before applying again.

Selection Committee

A committee from within the Starknet Foundation should look after the entire incentive program and make unbiased and rational decisions on all applications.

The committee’s remit would include liaising with the projects applying for grants on any queries, the release of grants, marketing activities for announcements, following up with projects to understand their learnings from the token distribution plan, and ensuring that all grants are distributed within the said duration specified by the project at the time of applying.

Suggested next steps

I would propose keeping this proposal open for discussion for a period of two weeks.

Based on all the comments and suggestions made by the community members, the Starknet Foundation could formally announce and launch the program by the end of March 2023. Projects could submit applications from 1 April 2023, and tokens could be allocated once Regenesis takes place.

[iddriss]

This is great. TVL on Starkent is pretty low, granted it’s still in its early phases; it could be better. While builders are gradually increasing TVL, an incentive program, as seen with Optimism and Avalanche, will most likely accelerate growth.

There should also be a limit on how many times (in a determined period and the project’s lifetime) a project can apply for the incentive program. This will ensure that the $STRK tokens reserved for the program are not quickly depleted and that the incentive is distributed evenly across the various protocols.

The questions look good too

[Tnorm]

Hi @david, great to see the Starknet incentives program discussion happening so early! As part of the Messari Governor team, my colleague @raho and I are excited to cover Starknet governance. We have previously released a primer on Optimism’s governance and incentives flywheel and would love to share insights from our observations of similar Layer 2 programs, particularly Optimism, that may be helpful for Starknet as they explore similar incentives.

1. Define Clear Objectives

It seems simple, but vagueness was one of the most significant shortcomings and sources of frustration for the Optimism community. It led to confusion and multiple iterations of fund distribution with varying degrees of success. Theoretically, the fund’s purpose should be straightforward; you hand the community money and tell them to promote growth. In reality, it is challenging to encourage growth without a general understanding of the following:

• What does network growth look like to the Starknet DAO?

  • The goal is to attract builders and users, but how will Starknet measure these goals?
  • Metrics to consider: Transactions, Users, Contracts Deployed, Bridged Funds, TVL, Liquidity, Retention, etc.

• What initiatives can you fund to promote growth (as defined above)?

  • A program optimizing for TVL will fund different types of builders and applications than a program optimizing for transaction volume or new users.

• How much to fund various areas of growth?

• What defines success?

  • You will ask yourself this eventually, so best to define it up-front.

Another Starknet-specific consideration is what blockers users and builders face when looking at Starknet specifically. Is this program responsible for funding development work to bring EVM-based blue-chips to Starknet - or does the community want to support Cairo native builders that build novel applications on the CairoVM?

There may not be any “wrong” answers here, but the community should decide on the most right ones and design the early phases of the Starknet Governance Fund around them.

2. Outline Accountability

This may also seem simple, but in practice, there are many different viewpoints on methods of payments, tracking, and accountability.

• How can the DAO ensure that work is completed and meets expectations (when that grant is funded before promised work completion)?
• How can the DAO track grant progress?
  • Is the committee responsible? Can operational overhead be lowered using contracts? (i.e. Optimistic Grants).
• What can the DAO do if the recipient takes the funding and returns nothing?
• How can the DAO measure the efficacy of the fund?
  • Community Dashboards like OP Summer and OP Quest are great examples of this, but are less effective if success isn’t defined up-front.

3. Consider Governance

The implications of using native token supply to fund incentives are admittedly controversial but should not be understated. Misallocating STRK could have lasting governance consequences and should not be taken lightly.

These are a few examples of what we believe should be foundational, day 1 thoughts before launching programs like the one mentioned in this post. We have explored the topic relatively deeply and are happy to discuss this further if it is something the Starknet community finds valuable.

[Decodefi]

A well thought out and detailed post. I would make a couple of comments:

1. The timeframe (end of March) seems somewhat soon for a proposal like this to pass and a formal program to be put in place. There would need to be significant agreement and engagement between now and then. It’s not impossible, but somewhat optimistic.

2. You mentioned projects should have exhausted their allocation before applying again, however I see a problem with discontinuity that could very negatively affect a protocol and it’s users if a revenue stream is cut off abruptly, if only temporarily. I would amend this part of your proposal to state that projects can re-apply while still reciving a previous incentive, however new incentives do not get distributed until the previous allocated is exhausted. This means that valuable projects within the Starknet ecosystem do not go through periods of random volatility because it’s between grant phases.

Everything else I tend to agree with. I believe the incentive program should only go to teams that commit to significant vetting by the governance council and agree to use the most up-to-date security measures to secure the funds being used.

[NathanVDH]

The first graph shown is very telling: once incentives run out if there is no real innovation, the music stops, and liquidity leaves. The real challenge of an incentivization program for Starknet is to make sure they stick around long-term. To do this, you need:

• deep liquidity on excellent DeFi products
• interesting/unique projects around gaming, art, and social coordination
• excellent tooling that allows devs to build and users to explore

For the early days of Starknet, these are the key things to encourage through something ideally more flexible than a grant program which is a very binary one project/one vote type of thing. Things I would love to see for example would be subsidizing gas fees for new users, the Foundation working out deals with MMs to ensure competitiveness, and finally grants for devs building necessary tooling for such a young ecosystem with low dev-tooling.

TL;DR: Grants are too binary and inflexible, they’re part of the solution but not all of it. There are better options out there to kickstart an ecosystem.

[web3magnetic]

As a governance delegate on Optimism, I have closely followed the governance proposals on Optimism, and one of they key takeaways is that while incentives can definitely bootstrap liquidity among DeFi protocols (arguably, incentives have been widely successful on Optimism without which many of the popular dapps would have struggled), care must be taken to ensure that the incentives are aligned with the goals of the network, and in particular the teams receiving incentives outline the way they would spend the incentives, and moreover verifiably demonstrate on an ongoing basis that the incentives are successfully utilised to bootstrap liquidity.

Without naming any particular projects or individuals, we have seen in Optimism governance that some of the incentives were given to projects that did not manage to bring liquidity over, but were used by the projects for themselves, resulting in lack of any value being capture by the network. Another example of inefficient incentives is DEXes offering incentives for users to execute swaps - again, this doesn’t benefit the network in any significant manner.

In order for any incentive scheme to be successful, the goal must be to bootstrap first level deep liquidity through the popular money markets, and second level incentives via AMM liquidity pool incentives.

[remi.stark]

I’m curious about the idea you raised regarding supporting applications that could assume and subsidize gas fees to onboard new users to the ecosystem, which is interesting. Has this been experimented with elsewhere? How scalable would it be? and what could be the best indicators for making an objective choice of eligible applications?

[webOfTrust]

Thank you @david for detailed post and starting the conversation around growth.

Wrt Optimism gov, I think they are doing marvelous work with their two pillar governance model and are thought leader in the space( i am biased though. )

Few thoughts :-
Accountability topic is missing from your list of question, we need to make sure that the incentives are going towards growth of the protocol/ecosystem rather than funding team wallet. How could we make sure that the use of funds are transparent, traceable and on-chain provable.

Gonna echo @web3magnetic comment, few projects were not able to attract sticky liquidity and rewards were distributed to liquidity farmers and/or team wallet but that’s the beauty of experiment. We try, fail, learn, implement and iterate.

Other challenge is weak protocol/project, not to name shame anyone but I do see that few protocol are alive because of continuous stream of incentives pumping into them. Such incentives are short lived not sustainable and a waste of resource.

We need to focus on innovative protocol, wallet and infra project, education content to make sure that its easy for developers to deploy on Starknet, translation could another domain to focus, gaming could be next frontier with low cost transaction.

There are lot to bite here and will be following this conversation closely.

[NathanVDH]

With native account abstraction, you’re much more flexible in terms of who pays the fees for a certain transaction, we should make use of that! To my knowledge, this hasn’t been experimented with as there are not many chains I can think of that have native AA (maybe NEAR?). In terms of scalability, I think you do need to set limits that could also serve as additional incentives for the curious to bridge over sooner than later. Finally, I’m not sure if apps should be selected for reduced fees or simply say something like new accounts get $10 worth of free transactions or something of the sort. I think option 1 is better, but the selection process is more complex.

[Jommi]

Really excited to see the this discussion being brought up in a timely manner. For Starknet to compete, we need to figure out our goals in regards to Growth and Grants in the Starknet ecosystem.

At Equilibrium, we have multiple years of experience of working with a massive array of different grant and ecosystem programs - so would love to pitch in to the discussions when we get closer to proposing something. I also personally have past experience of mechanism design and incentivive design via previous work.

A lot of the thoughts I had have already been mentioned, but some other things to mention are:

• When starting out, start small. Iterate fast.

  • In my mind this would show up as a cohort-based model. That would mean that we can have a clear way of tracking changes to the program, and recognize when a change we make results in better or worse results. Simultaneously, it focuses the community on moving fast instead of becoming content and possibly lazy.

• Keep room for public goods funding.

  • A Growth focused incentive program is like rocket fuel. It should be used for quick and intense boosts with shock-value. But if you try to put rocket fuel in a rocket that isn’t ready - you’re not gonna get far. So let’s make sure that we keep up with the need for ecosystem tooling and other infra - so that we can get actually get far.

• Seperate dApp incentives and network incentives.

  • I think @NathanVDH has the right ideas here. Having personally worked with the NEAR (and Aurora) ecosystems, it has been quite interesting to see how they spend their tokens to improve the network UX as a whole.
  • The thing to keep in mind here though that it’s also a technical challenge, not just a financial one. If we start subsidizing gas, usage etc. we need to be ready for an army of bots to arrive (Happened w/ NEAR, Aurora etc.). They combatted this with low-level KYC (email address sign up to get free gas) - is that something we want to look at as well?

[Chas]

I’m not sure if apps should be selected for reduced fees or simply say something like new accounts get $10 worth of free transactions or something of the sort.

@NathanVDH I align with the sentiment of your initial points upon what is needed for a sticky, long-term eco (deep liq on DeFi, interesting/unique culture, excellent tooling). Taking that into account, if we were to opt to gas subsidies; rather than going through a complex selection process or equally subsidizing to all potential participants, we could tailor it on a need-based & targetted basis.

Just as a short example, using questions such as:

• Are potential participants in this category sensitive to gas costs? how much marginal TVL/value would they bring with subsidized gas costs?

• Introducing deep liquidity throughout Starknet DeFi protocols

At reasonable sizes to operate in DeFi (accounting for typical yields, number of txs involved, etc), the effect of a subsidy on gas costs would be marginal to the value they typically operate with. Thus added value per dollar spent on subsidies will be minimal. Case might change if you look at this from a DeFi developer perspective though, where deploying & testing contracts could possibly be subsidized to encourage a builder community etc.

• Interesting/unique projects around gaming, art, and social coordination

Yes. In this case wrt gaming, art, and culture, a hefty size isn’t usually & shouldn’t be expected to be on the level of DeFi. From anecdotal experience, many participants typically use a burner wallet or are just casual people who don’t interact with the broader DeFi system. This category typically also has much more tx counts (ie on-chain gaming, clicky-clicky approve etc go brrrr ).

• Excellent tooling that allows devs to build and users to explore

Same reasoning as above (DeFi bullet point) wrt giving subsidies to devs deploying & testing on Starknet.

[dhruv]

Hi all! This is Dhruv from the BD team at Nostra. First of all, many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to contribute to the discussion. This is a crucial topic that impacts the entire Starknet community so it would be useful to hear from as many of you (including the Starknet Foundation) as possible. Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Some thoughts on the common themes emerging in the responses:

Defining objectives and outlining accountability

Thank you especially to @Tnorm for raising these points based on your experiences with Optimism’s governance. We agree that the Selection Committee and community members should be fully in sync about the definition of network growth and the different metrics to measure it.

Deep liquidity is important for everything else so it should be used as the main metric to get things started. Echoing what @web3magnetic mentioned, some of the grants given by Optimism governance were used by DEXes offering rewards for users (i.e. liquidity farmers) to execute swaps, resulting in non-sticky liquidity that does little to enhance the ecosystem. We agree with web3magnetic that the initial incentives should be directed towards bootstrapping sticky liquidity through incentivising money markets and then AMM liquidity pool incentives. This would provide a solid foundation to build on.

Having clear objectives is closely related to accountability. Making sure that the incentives aren’t used to fund team wallets is paramount, but so is establishing a framework to track progress of the work, and determine whether work is being completed and meets expectations. The primary responsibility of making sure that things are not slipping could be delegated to the Selection Committee. A member of the Selection Committee could be assigned to do regular check-ins with a point of contact from the recipient’s team publicly on the governance forum. It would be useful to hear from committee members, particularly those familiar with Avalanche and Optimism governance, on how to establish such an accountability framework.

Fine tuning the criteria

A few points were raised regarding when you can apply, and how many times you can apply.

Decodefi (unable to tag) raised a valid point that projects should be allowed to re-apply while still using a previous incentive allocation, however, the new incentive allocation should only be distributed once the previous incentive allocation is exhausted. This makes sense to us, as it helps projects have visibility on their runway.

Others mentioned limiting how many times a project who has received a grant can apply for another one. In our opinion, there shouldn’t be any limit of this sort but rather applications should be considered by the Selection Committee on an ad hoc basis. There may be a genuine reason why a project is reapplying.

Also it is noted that the aim to launch the program by the end of March 2023 is quite ambitious. It would be useful to hear Starknet Foundation’s (and the Builder Council’s) views on the proposed timeline.

Final thoughts

The discussion about subsidising the gas fees of users is definitely worth considering but we think it should be supplementary to any incentive program, not a substitute. There shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. In any case, gas fees on Starknet are lower than other networks.

Again, as mentioned above, we encourage everyone (especially other teams building on Starknet, who we haven’t heard from, and the Starknet Foundation) to share their thoughts.

[odin-free.ffs]

@davgarai thanks for the proposal

here are some of my personal questions:

How would you see the plan to address potential issues such as token farming, and ensure that incentives are used to drive genuine growth and adoption?
How would you measure the success of the proposed incentive program beyond just TVL, and what other metrics would be used to evaluate growth and adoption?

cheers
Oli

[RTP2016]

GM! Richard from Nostra here

@odin-free.ffs Thanks for your comment. Good to see you getting involved in the conversation! I thought I’d chime in here on your questions.

@odin-free.ffs

How would you see the plan to address potential issues such as token farming, and ensure that incentives are used to drive genuine growth and adoption?

I agree token farming has been an issue with previous designs in token distribution. However, we see more intelligent ways to mitigate this risk, here are some suggestions:

1. Creating and sharing an open-sourced method for sybil-detection that should be used by Starknet and all projects that receive $STRK tokens from the selection committee for community distribution. This would allow a top-level filter for any known and identified farmers. The criteria for such an exclusion list would need to be ratified.

2. Hop protocol did something similar, and you can check the details here, Alchemy also wrote about this.

3. Creating a token incentive design that promotes token use for its intended purpose (governance, security, in-app utility, etc.) and disincentivises short-term thinking. This should be tailored to the Starknet Foundation’s overarching goal for each segment (DeFi, Gaming, Infrastructure) and each protocol’s key metrics that align to sustainable user activity.

4. Incentivising token delegation or governance participation in a way which encourages engagement with the wider community.

@odin-free.ffs

How would you measure the success of the proposed incentive program beyond just TVL, and what other metrics would be used to evaluate growth and adoption?

Success can be measured in various ways, for example:

• Daily active users
• New users
• No. of transactions
• Daily fees
• TVL

This also warrants a dedicated discussion; however, we can start from first principles and ask:

“What is the purpose of Starknet?”

Taking some language from the Starknet website, it is to enable “any dApp to achieve unlimited scale for its computation – without compromising Ethereum’s composability and security.”

Ethereum offers blockspace with high economic security; however, as many appreciate, it is too slow and expensive to scale in its current state, which is one of the main reasons other scaling solutions exist, such as Starknet.

So now, the question becomes:
“what is the purpose of this unlimited scalability with high security?”

The purpose is for projects like ours to build products on Starknet that can serve a large amount of user activity while making usage less prohibitive in terms of transaction fees.

With any new product, the “cold start” problem must be approached correctly and overcome to build a network of users. Typically, it’s hard to get things right the first time, so we recommend having a phased approach that allows adjustments based on observing the outcomes and feedback.

@odin-free.ffs I’m curious to get your thoughts. What do you consider key success metrics for scaling solutions such as Starknet?

Thanks!
Richard

[darkosnightmare]

Given that the success of Starknet and the value of STRK will be driven primarily by usage of the network, and given that liquidity is most sustainably incentivized by the demand generated by users, it seems the primary focus should be on incentivizing usage. In my opinion, the most effective ways to do that would be to:

• Subsidize transactions to overcome the “cold start” problem @RTP2016 references, perhaps with a daily transactions goal at which point subsidies are phased out.
• As has been suggested previously, reward contract deployers / owners that drive usage with a portion of the fees its users generate.

With this approach, we both incentivize users to migrate to Starknet, as well as incentivize builders to build. Additionally, those builders are able to further incentivize their users via their own STRK rewards (and they will certainly be pressured to do so by their communities). Another major benefit to this approach is the inherent Sybil resistance, and the lack of any requirement for complicated governance or subjective standards.

[david]

Thank you, @jane0mac, for submitting a new proposal on this topic.

While I appreciate the initiative, I do not see the logic behind creating a completely new proposal (instead of getting behind this one), and then rallying influencers behind yours for what appears to be some political game. I think it’s unnecessary since you seem to agree with everything I proposed here while simply making some suggestions to the existing framework we’ve been establishing with the community. This is not meant to be “Nostra’s proposal”: I made this proposal on my own for the benefit of the whole Starknet community, including you. Using the Starknet governance process as a way to compete with each other is counterproductive. Let’s prioritise cooperation and problem-solving.

Since this post has already received many views and comments from the team members of Messari Governor, Equilibrium, OP delegates, and other community members who all have a great deal of experience on this topic, and whose opinions we should value, I suggest we continue this discussion here.

To summarise @jane0mac 's suggestions:

1. Name: Jane suggests renaming the Starknet Governance Fund to the Starknet Growth Fund, and I agree with this proposal. It better encapsulates what we’re trying to do here.

2. Governance Structure: Jane suggests renaming the Selection Committee to the Starknet Growth Committee. I don’t think anyone disagrees with this. We haven’t discussed the specific structure for this yet but Jane suggests this should consist of 5-10 people, including a mix of Starkware employees, committee members, and a committee lead to oversee its functions. I think this works if we can establish clear roles and clear out conflicts.

3. Purpose: Jane suggests that the scope of the Starknet Growth Committee should not only cover Incentives but also Marketing and User Education. This suggestion has already been raised, and I believe we can extend the Committee’s role to cover this area provided we address practical issues.

For example, as a Balancer DAO Multisig Signer, I have closely followed the development of sub-DAOs, including their Marketing sub-DAO, which have had mixed success. This is mainly because they can only do so much. Traditional marketing activities are not typically set up this way because it would be difficult for a decentralised Fund (and I think that’s what we’re aiming for here) to convert STRK tokens to fiat and run marketing on a day-to-day level, and therefore, such roles rarely go beyond brainstorming. In my opinion traditional marketing activities are better reserved for Starkware, and individual projects building on Starkware, since they also have a very strong vested interest. However, blockchain-native incentive programmes can definitely be organised this way.

I’m especially interested about hearing from @Tnorm and @raho from the Messari Governor team about what’s most optimal structure for the Growth Committee, and I’m also interested in hearing his views about the implications of establishing sub-DAOs with a broader mandate, i.e. bringing Marketing and User Education under the same umbrella as Incentives.

This thread is intended for discussion in the first place, where all ideas are welcome. I hope we can move forward with this conversation in a constructive way.

[Cylvestre]

Thank you for sharing your proposal to launch a Starknet Governance Fund. It is an interesting idea and I appreciate the effort you have put into outlining the various phases and details of the program.

However, there are a few points that could be elaborated on:

1. Clarity on the fund’s objectives: While the proposal discusses the need for incentives to target users and increase TVL, it would be helpful to have more clarity on what the fund aims to achieve. For instance, what specific metrics will be used to measure the success of the program? What are the short and long-term goals?
2. Transparency in the selection committee: It is important to ensure that the selection committee is composed of individuals who are impartial and free from conflicts of interest. Can you provide more information on how the committee members will be chosen and what their qualifications will be?
3. Token distribution plan: It would be helpful to have more information on how the tokens will be distributed and what measures will be put in place to prevent abuse or fraud. Additionally, it would be good to have more details on how the program will ensure that tokens are used effectively to promote the growth of the ecosystem.

[Cookie420]

Hi @david from one hand I 100% agree with what you said, if starknet wants to be as prominent a chain as it aspires to be, we need to start fighting for devs, etc, some will just choose to build here, but others will need to be convinced and money, expertise, etc is a great idea. On the other hand, if something like this would pass, there will be 1000s more people trying to get airdrop. Im not a technical person so my question is, if there were 100 or 1000 more people transacting on a chain, would it be a pain in the ass for devs? I mean, look at what is happening at goerli, geth suddenly is money.
You know how USA never told what would they do if China nuked Taiwan? They did that because it let them keep them both in check. I think as long as starknet is not ready for big tps spike, there shouldn’t be any talks about airdop. Incentives for devs are awesome, I think developing some sort of committee made of specialists in starknet ecosystem would be awesome too.

[AoH]

Completely agree. At the very least, Starknet tokenomics should be changed. The lack of a certain supply for the airdrop in Tokenomics is already a red flag for the community in general in 2023.

The competition in L2, ZK L2 is so great that if Starknet with its slow transactions, simply cannot stand it, if it leaves all the tokens in the Foundation, Treasury or distributes to investors and leaves the rest of the tokens to the team.

Starknet airdrop is necessary both for image and marketing results.

[li0799]

@david

Optimism

Before Optimism launched token economics, its TVL was not very ideal. After the token was launched, the TVL had an astonishing rise. I think starknet also needs a token economics like Optimism to stimulate the development of the entire ecology.