The Starknet Foundation has announced a new grant program supporting $5 million worth of USDC for emerging projects on the network.
The new $5 million seed grant program aims to support at least 200 promising teams with USD Coin (USDC) per beneficiary, giving them a “final push” to launch their final-stage projects on Ethereum Layer 2 extension, Starknet. provides. It is a solution based on zero-knowledge rollup technology.
According to Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, the $5 million grant program comes in response to a key challenge for current Starknet developers. Oliva told Cointelegraph:
“We are listening carefully to developers (developers) and hearing about the key challenges they face. We’re talking about people with incredible creativity and vision who always need support for the difficult ‘last mile’ to get their projects off the line and into production. So we responded with this program, which is intended to be very direct and with minimal bureaucracy to address this problem.”
This grant is targeted at Starknet-related projects that have already developed a minimum viable product (MVP) or proof of concept. According to Oliva, the main goal is to foster more blockchain innovation. He added:
“In general, we want to reduce the barriers and pressures faced by young teams when considering starting a project. We are committed to paving the way for innovation.”
Starknet is attracting more and more developers to its ecosystem. According to Electric Capital’s 2023 Developer Report, the total number of monthly developers increased to more than 22,400 in December 2023. This represents an increase of more than 113% over the past three years, from 10,500 in December 2020.
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Web3 Games remains the best utility driver for Starknet and the broader blockchain space.
When asked about the most exciting projects and protocol categories being built on Starknet, Oliva said blockchain gaming remains the top use case. He told Cointelegraph:
“Starknet is leading the way in fully on-chain gaming. Key projects in this space include Realms, Influence, and Dojo. This sector is growing rapidly with more teams building on top of Starknet using the Dojo standard. Games are important to everyone, not just gamers. Because games require networks, test performance, and prove performance.”
According to DappRadar data, blockchain gaming accounted for 35% of all decentralized application activity, with over 2.2 million unique active wallets per day.
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