Starknet

Starknet has opened claims for the strkBTC faucet, with selected registrants now able to claim the bridged Bitcoin asset on Starknet. The round's $833 prize pool is split among up to 100 randomly selected users at roughly $8.33 in strkBTC each.

For those not selected this round, registrations reopen once again on the 29th.

• Claims are live for the current selection round.
• Unselected users can register again when sign-ups reopen on the 29th.
• Part of Starknet's broader effort to distribute bridged Bitcoin across its network.

STRK20 is live on Starknet as a privacy pool rather than a protocol standard, with shielded assets production-ready on mainnet and composable with Starknet's public DeFi rails. Chance's STRK20 integration has now gone live as well: Chance checks each transfer against a signed mandate and returns a receipt showing it was authorized, while keeping the sender, recipient and amount confidential.

• Shielded balances and transfers run on existing Starknet liquidity and wallets, no separate privacy wallet required.
• The Chance integration points at compliant, verifiable private payments — proof of authorization plus confidentiality.

Garden (@gardenfi) now powers the strkBTC bridge, giving users a route to bring native BTC to Starknet or swap supported assets from 11+ networks through Garden's infrastructure. Bridged strkBTC can then be put to work across Starknet DeFi, shielded for a private balance, or topped up via the strkBTC faucet.

• Garden positions itself as a fast, low-fee, non-custodial path for Bitcoin liquidity onto Starknet.
• Announcement comes as Starknet leans on third-party bridges (alongside Atomiq) to grow strkBTC supply.
• The same asset remains usable across the network's DeFi and privacy rails after bridging.

Ekubo, the DEX built on Starknet, has launched private swaps that let users exchange shielded tokens confidentially while drawing on the same liquidity pools as public swaps. The feature brings privacy to token trading on Starknet's existing DeFi rails rather than requiring separate, siloed liquidity.

• Swaps of shielded tokens run on Ekubo's Starknet-based infrastructure.
• Uses the same liquidity as public swaps, so privacy doesn't fragment order books.
• Announced via Starknet's official channels; participation involves screening at points of entry, per the accompanying disclaimer.

The Starknet Foundation introduced the judging panel for PROOF Cohort 01, the accelerator's first cohort. The lineup includes Amit Mehra, Partner at Borderless Capital, and Damien Roch, Partner at Blockwall.

• Judges will evaluate the seven teams presenting at the cohort's Demo Day on 22 September 2026.
• PROOF is the Foundation's accelerator program supporting projects building on Starknet.

StarkWare said it mined what it called the first quantum-safe Bitcoin spend on mainnet in August, sending 3.1 BTC with a method no quantum computer could forge under Bitcoin's existing rules. The Block independently confirmed it as the first quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction, citing StarkWare. QSB is opt-in, protects coins prepared in advance, and gives custodians a spend path they can provision now without waiting on a soft fork; Starknet frames the real quantum risk to Bitcoin as paralysis rather than theft.

StarkWare, Yukon Research and Eigen Labs have opened a prize challenge to drive that cost down. Generating the mainnet transaction took 3,100 GPU-hours of hashing and $320 of compute, and teams can compete — with over $20k in prizes — to reduce those numbers. It serves as a proof-of-concept for making Bitcoin transactions resilient to future quantum computing.

• QSB is opt-in and protects coins prepared in advance.
• Challenge targets cutting the GPU-hashing and compute cost of a quantum-safe spend.

The Starknet Foundation has announced PROOF: Cohort 01 Demo Day will take place on 22 September 2026 at 13:00 GMT. Seven teams will each present for four minutes in a livestreamed event, marking the culmination of the first PROOF accelerator cohort.

• The event will be broadcast via the Starknet Foundation's official channels.
• PROOF is an accelerator program run by the Starknet Foundation to support projects building on Starknet.

Eigen Labs (@eigenlabs) turned the question of quantum-computing cost into an open public challenge, with 100+ humans and their AI agents competing on an open leaderboard around one machine-checked question: how cheaply can you run the point addition operation that Shor's algorithm needs to break ECDSA. The reference point was Google Quantum AI's March demonstration proving a record-breaking quantum circuit exists without publishing the implementation.

Replying to its own earlier post, Starknet reports the challenge answer is now more than 60% better than what Google reported — 1,259 logical qubits and 903k Toffoli gates. The two sides use different accounting conventions, so it is a numerical comparison rather than a formal claim of dominance.

• Open, public challenge combining humans and AI agents on a transparent leaderboard.
• Outcome improves on Google's figure for the resource cost of a Shor-based ECDSA break.

StarkWare is shipping Starknet v0.14.4, a release it describes as a major unlock for developers. The upgrade lets applications prove logic that exceeds the network's regular per-transaction limits, meaning dApps can run heavier, larger-scale computation onchain.

• Comes as a protocol upgrade for the Starknet network.
• Aimed at expanding what applications can build, not a marketing push.

Blockchain-data network Lava now offers Starknet RPC endpoints through its Lava Gateway, a decentralized provider network. A free tier is available for developers to access Starknet's node infrastructure.

• Access runs via Lava's decentralized providers rather than a single centralized RPC.
• Retweeted by Starknet's official account, signaling it as a supported access route.