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StarkWare Cuts Staff and Restructures Into Two Units

DeFi

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April 13, 2026

StarkWare Cuts Staff and Restructures Into Two Units

The company behind Starknet is pivoting from pure infrastructure toward revenue-generating products built on its proprietary tech stack.

StarkWare, the Israeli company behind the Starknet Layer 2 network, is laying off an undisclosed number of employees and reorganizing into two independent business units as it attempts to convert its zero-knowledge technology leadership into sustainable revenue.

Co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson announced the changes in a company-wide town hall and a subsequent post on X, telling staff that StarkWare has become “too big and too inefficient” for the leaner, faster-moving strategy the company now requires.

“We built the best, safest, most battle-tested ZK tech in blockchain,” Ben-Sasson wrote. “We’ve redefined blockchain using our technology, but that’s not enough.”

The restructuring comes amid a collapse in Starknet’s revenue, which peaked near $6 million in November 2023 but has since fallen to roughly $4,000 in daily fees through the first half of April, per DefiLlama.

Starknet Monthly Fees

The decline is not unique to Starknet. Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade in March 2024 introduced EIP-4844, which replaced gas-intensive calldata with lightweight blobs and significantly slashed Layer 2 transaction fees. The upgrade was a boon for users but gutted fee revenue across the board for rollup providers, a dynamic that has only intensified over the past year. DeFi protocols deploying across multiple L2s have found that over 90% of their fee income still accrues on the Ethereum mainnet.

Under the new structure, StarkWare will operate two purpose-focused units, one led by researcher Avihu Levy and another led by Tom Brand, each serving as a general manager with dedicated business development, engineering, product, and go-to-market teams. Ben-Sasson said the company would adopt a “startup mode” mindset, emphasizing small teams, rapid experimentation, and iterating quickly toward product-market fit.

Levy recently led work on a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction scheme that uses only existing Bitcoin consensus rules to sidestep the network’s contentious upgrade process. That research is broadly in line with the direction Ben-Sasson outlined for the new applications unit, which will focus on products with “immense potential revenue” that rely on StarkWare’s proprietary stack, including Cairo, Sierra, and its STARK-based cryptography, while minimizing dependencies on external L1 networks.

Additional leadership changes accompany the restructuring. CFO Ran Grinshtein will take over supervision of finance, human resources, security, and IT. Head of Core Engineering Gideon Kaempfer will become chief architect, reporting directly to Ben-Sasson. COO Oren Katz is leaving and will remain in the role through the end of April.

STRK, Starknet’s native token, is trading near $0.033, according to CoinGecko, down more than 95% from its all-time high in March 2024.

The cuts add to a wave of layoffs across the crypto sector this year. StarkWare, which closed its Series D at an $8 billion valuation in 2022 and has raised $287 million in total funding, declined to comment.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

Michael Saylor’s Strategy added 13,927 bitcoin for $1 billion

Ethereum

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April 13, 2026

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Michael Saylor’s Strategy added 13,927 bitcoin for $1 billion

Michael Saylor’s Strategy (MSTR) added 13,927 bitcoin to its treasury over the past week at an average price of about $71,902 per coin, for a total cost of roughly $1 billion, according to a Monday filing.

The purchase brings the company’s total holdings to 780,897 BTC, acquired for approximately $59.02 billion at an average cost basis of $75,577.

Last week’s acquisitions were entirely funded by $1 billion raised through sales of the company’s preferred stock, Stretch (STRC).

The current price of bitcoin is hovering just below $71,000, while MSTR shares are down more than 2.5% in pre-market trading.

Read More: The one metric investors are overlooking in Michael Saylor’s Strategy

Scout Insurtech Reveals the AI Paradox

Fintech

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April 13, 2026

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At InsurTech NY, Chris Luiz from Scout Insurtech believes he is working to solve the single most important problem facing the insurance industry: its historical struggle to engage effectively with technology.

Scout Insurtech argues that simply maintaining a “tech-forward posture” is not enough to succeed and instead, he dedicates a huge amount of time to creating situations where people build genuine, real-world relationships to figure out how Scout Insurtech can actually engage and partner with technology companies.

For Luiz, this relationship building is the biggest challenge the industry faces and praises events like InsurTech NY for matching him with people who are truly looking outside their own companies for opportunities, which served as a model for Scout Insurtech’s own conference ecosystem.

Luiz thinks that most people are underestimating how quickly and profoundly the advent of AI will change roles and the fundamental engagement model across the business. People accustomed to working solely behind a computer will soon find themselves with little to do if they cannot shift to having meaningful conversations and building relationships to drive business.

The more interesting, long-term effect of AI, according to Scout Insurtech, is a systemic shift in leadership development. As AI takes over many front-line positions, such as those in claims and call centers, the insurance industry will lose its traditional talent pipeline where future executives gain a fundamental understanding of the business by rising through those ranks.

Luiz notes that this creates a paradoxical problem as Scout Insurtech is now building software and training programs designed to deliberately emulate the experience of being a front-line claims adjuster to properly prepare people for higher-level management and executive roles.

SEC Proposes Certain Crypto Interfaces Don’t Need to Register as Brokers

Regulation

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April 13, 2026

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SEC Proposes Certain Crypto Interfaces Don’t Need to Register as Brokers

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued a staff statement clarifying how the agency plans to interpret software interfaces facilitating crypto transactions in its broker-dealer regulations.

In a Monday statement, the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets staff said that under certain circumstances, interfaces that “assist users engaging in user-initiated crypto asset securities transactions on blockchain protocols […] utilizing the user’s self-custodial wallet” may not necessarily be required to register as a broker-dealer with the agency.

Source: SEC

The SEC statement specified that self-custodial wallets with such user interfaces may be exempt from registration requirements, provided they do not “solicit investors to engage in any specific crypto asset securities transactions,” provide commentary on “any potential execution [routes] displayed to a user,” and other circumstances.

Although the staff statement does not carry the same weight as a proposed SEC rule subject to public comment and review, it was intended to “provide greater clarity on the application of the federal securities laws to activities involving crypto asset securities.”

It follows several others that the SEC has issued following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump in January 2025, leading to new leadership at the agency in what many have seen as friendlier to the crypto industry.

Related: Ex-SEC, Coinbase staffer becomes Securitize president

“While the staff expressing its view is helpful, I favor a more permanent regulatory approach that addresses the broker definition in light of current market circumstances,” said SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, adding:

“Crypto is forcing the Commission to confront its inner demons that have driven it toward ever more expansive readings of the securities laws.”

SEC leadership is still entirely Republican and understaffed

Although Trump announced several new nominations for various federal positions on Monday after a month of silence on the matter, no additional picks for the SEC or Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were among the president’s names. Both financial regulators responsible for overseeing crypto regulation in the country face a dearth of leadership amid resignations and lack of nominations from the White House.

At the SEC, only three Republican commissioners out of five remain, while only CFTC Chair Michael Selig, also a Republican, serves at the commodities regulator following the departure of Caroline Pham in December.

Some lawmakers have proposed attaching a provision to a market structure bill under consideration in the Senate to require a minimum level of staffing at the SEC and CFTC before the legislation can take effect.