Been noticing more DEX and trading platform teams talking about deploying on Starknet instead of straight to Ethereum mainnet, curious what others here think is driving that.
From what I’ve seen, it comes down to a few practical problems that exchanges run into on L1. Order matching engines need to process a high volume of transactions fast, and gas costs on mainnet make that expensive at scale, especially for anything doing frequent order updates or cancellations. ZK-rollups like Starknet cut that cost dramatically while still settling back to Ethereum for security.
The other piece is finality and throughput. A trading platform lives or dies on how fast it can match and confirm orders. L2 execution environments handle that far better than trying to force high-frequency logic through mainnet directly.
There’s also a security angle. Since Starknet inherits Ethereum’s security through validity proofs, exchange teams get L1-level trust guarantees without paying L1-level fees. That tradeoff seems to be why we’re seeing more serious infrastructure get built here instead of just simple swap contracts.
Curious if others building or researching trading infrastructure on Starknet have run into scaling wins (or tradeoffs) worth sharing. For anyone digging into how exchange backend architecture actually gets built end to end, this covers the process in more depth: Crypto Exchange Developers for Hire