How to save Starknet : 3 (simple) ideas
Hi, I’m RiskTaker, I’m part of many DeFi/airdrop farming communities. Sure, we are the ones that put money on a new ecosystem, only to get a bounty 6 months later. But we usually are the early adopters, since we can handle risks better than any other retail investor, and we are small enought to thrive even when liquidity is thin. So, our opinion might be usefull 
Rescue team is here guys !
Here is the thing : Starknet has quite a bad reputation now in DeFi/farming communities. No need to explain, it’s not the point here and it’s been discused hundreds of time
So, how can we increase Starknet’ liquidity, and turn it from a « cool tech no one care about» chain to a « liquidity leader » everyone want to use ?
Here are 3 ideas I’ve had. None of them imply a second STRK airdrop (but it would help, of course). I’m not the only one who had this ideas for sure, but they have the power to make Starknet (at least) 5 times bigger in the span of 6 months. They aren’t meant to add $2B TVL each, but they would change the reputation of Starknet and turn it into « the cool kid ». Training wheel is not moving right now, so we need to work on it
Let’s go !
1. Bridge LRTs to Starknet to raise awareness
Sadly, it’s a little bit late since ETHFI#1 is done and REZ#1 is going to be distributed in early may, it would have been perfect 3 months ago (when LRTs were only avalaible on Ethereum and Arbitrum). But it still is a no brainer !
LRTs is THE defi trend of 2024. People right now want to play with eETH (ether.fi), ezETH (Renzo), rswETH (Swell) and many others. EigenLayer could be one of the biggest airdrop of all times, and a whole new field of innovation. ETHFI #1 (etherfi) itself airdropped ~$300M to users. So, hype is real for sure !
Biggest LRTs (ezETH and eETH) ara available on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Mode, Base and Linea
Let’s talk about Mode. It’s another useless L2, who only exists to launch a token (users are aware about that). TVL right now is $325M, with no native Mode token. Out of these 325M, ezETH is $141M ! That’s a 43 % !! And we could add eETH and Stone…
Bridging LRTs right now would not incease Starknet TVL by $500M obviously (and it’s a bit late), but it would change people’s mind from « I have no airdrop, I hate you » to « okay, so I can farm 2 x Renzo (or whatever) + EigenLayer + Nostra (or whatever DeFi protocol) + Starknet #2, that’s cool ».
Adding at least one top 4 LRT (etherfi, Renzo, Kelp, Swell) to Starknet would change people’s mind. Starknet wouldn’t look like this isolated pacific island, it would be like archipelago of Japan : independant, but close to Ethereum ecosystem
Then, adding 1 or 2 exotic LRT would be cool, since it would be waaaay cheaper than on Ethereum. If peg is good, people will swap in order to farm something instead of just holding ETH on zkLend or whatever
Exemple : Inception, Genesis, Claystak, Diva Staking
(Since Starknet is not EVM, you’ll probably need to negociate a little bit with teams in order to guarantee users would get their points/airdrop)
I would personnaly farm LRTs on Starknet, instead of holding useless ETH.
Who doesn’t love Eigen points ?
2. Add a Pendle-like protocol to make people happy
Okay, Starknet is supposed to be neutral so I might be wrong, but Abdel asked about ideas so here are mines.
Pendle is the pinacle of 2024 DeFi : it’s super-powerfull, kind of hard to understand, but can change lives. That’s what people love !
A whale can use Pendle to earn +6 % ETH in only 2 months. A shrimp (such a me) can use Pendle to earn +$10k airdrops in 6 months. That’s what is so incredible with yield markets.
After bridging LRTs to Starknet, people would need to play with it. Providing liquidity/lending is cool, but it’s not hard enought for some people, we are not in 2021 anymore. So, people (including me) are using Pendle to farm 15 times faster. Others are making a juicy +40 % APR yield on eth (wich is incredible, it’s 10 times higher than staking rewards).
Using a yield market can be tricky when you’re a newbie, so I would suggest to copy/paste the frontend of Pendle. It would reduce friction a lot
PENDLE market cap is 600M right now, token made a 100x. So, buying PENDLE months ago was a juicy move. Having a yield market would directly increase Starknet attractiveness, since users would have a brand new (juicy?) airdrop to farm. Many people are affraid Ekubo/Nostra/Avnu airdrops will be disapointed (let say, 140 for 6 months lending/LP). From a marketing POV, we need a Jito-like airdrop : huge amounts, to not-so-many people. That’s exacty what Pendle is : huge amounts, not-so-many people.
And, obviously, it would still be used after LRTs trend fade, in order to farm new things and new protocols (such as Ethena recently)
DEX/money markets were 2021 DeFi essentials. Perp was 2022 DeFi bare minimum. Yield markets are 2024 must-have 
3. Connect to Hyperlane for the HYPE
Not sure about this one, but Hyperlane is a thriving protocol. People are using it to farm HYPE airdrop, but bridging throught Hyperlane is also very quick (and not so expansive). Since it’s permissionless, you don’t need to pay in order to use it (as a protocol). And it’s chain agnostic, it can be used on an EVM chain, a Cosmos chain, etc. So why not a Cairo VM chain
Connecting Starknet to Hyperlane would have 2 effects :
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1 : Starknet is more and more integrated to Ethereum and other chains (sorry, but native bridging and Orbiter bridging feel so bad for 99 % of users)
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2 : people farming Hyperlane airdrop are going from time to time on Starknet. Hyperlane is hyped now, but « we are still early », so it’s not late at all.
BONUS : more ideas to pump Starknet
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a ve(3,3) DEX with a nice frontend such as Aerodrome. Always a good idea to increase TVL/volume/reputation by making a 50x on one token, but I have to say I don’t really like them
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an order-book DEX just as Mangrove Exchange. Way less hyped than a ve(3,3), but also more interesting from an innovation point of view
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make « unruggable meme » looks more like Pinksale (https://www.pinksale.finance/). Unruggable is a great idea, but for now it doesn’t help degens buying memecoins with live-charts and all that stuff
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a leverage farming protocol and/or an autocompounder (such as Alpaca or Beefy). Not so usefull when fees are 1 cent, no hype about it
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a delta-neutral stablecoin such as Ethena. I don’t really like it, stablecoins are not supposed to be degen. Probably not the first thing to create, but it could be a great extender when training wheel is already moving
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create new things ! Way more difficult to talk about it because I’m not deep into tech, but things like Kakarot zkEVM or Madara could be very interesting from a user POV. We don’t HAVE to make it about points/airdrop or whatever, but seeing new things being built make people happy
So, here are my ideas for Starknet, I hope it could help. I’m not a tech guy so I can’t build it, but I would love to beta test any of your work. I like Starknet and I hold my STRK airdrop, so I would love to see it thrive and reach $5 or $10 billions TVL
Hostages are safe boss !
Disclaimer : I’m a retail, I’m not part of any team. I hold tokens from etherfi, Renzo, Swell, Diva, and I’m using some of the protocols I mentionned just above. And I’m not a tech guy, so everything I say might be stupid/too difficult to bootstrap and I’m sorry about that Thanks for your understanding !