KAITO

Starknet Signal: September 2026 STARKtember, Shipped. And just like that, we enter Q4. September brought more of Starknet’s core capabilities into products: privacy across more applications, more ways to use Bitcoin, larger proven computation, and continued progress on quantum security. Here’s what shipped. Privacy moves into more products Ekubo added support for private swaps. Users can now swap privately while accessing the same public liquidity available to regular swaps. Instead of creating separate private markets and fragmenting liquidity, privacy composes with Starknet’s existing DeFi infrastructure. Chance integrated STRK20 into its agent verification layer. Chance checks transfers against a user-signed mandate and produces a receipt proving the action was authorised, while STRK20 keeps the sender, recipient and amount confidential. This gives AI agents a way to transact privately while keeping their actions verifiable against the permissions they were given. Haven is now live on Starknet. The private neobank lets users deposit from supported chains, save and spend while keeping their financial activity confidential. YieldStark (@yieldstark) brought private DeFi flows directly into its app. Users can now shield WBTC and USDC, send assets privately, lend privately through Vesu, swap privately through avnu and track shielded balances from the same interface. Approximately $1.5 million is now shielded in the privacy pool, spanning 50 tokens, with 3,000+ unique wallets having chosen privacy on Starknet since launch. More applications are adding privacy, all of them remain connected to the public infrastructure built on Starknet. Take a look at current live apps: https://strk20.starknet.io/app/live-apps Spotlight: DashX Global payroll is a $35B industry, yet very little of it runs onchain. Blockchains offer fast, low-cost, global payment rails, but businesses need to keep sensitive payroll information private. DashX uses STRK20, Starknet’s privacy framework, to bring that workflow onchain without making payroll activity public. Global teams can schedule recurring USDC payouts while keeping the link between the company and each employee’s wallet private. Deposits into the privacy pool remain public, but the connection to individual recipients is hidden, giving businesses the benefits of onchain payments without broadcasting who they pay. Running a global team and ready to bring payroll onchain? Get started at dashx.xyz. Builders and programmes Builders put privacy to the test The STRK20 Private Sprint brought together more than 220 builders working on 200 projects. Its three winners applied privacy to payments and auctions: First place: Erebus (@Erebus_pvt) private transactions between agents. Second place: StakeWars private sealed-bid auctions. Third place: Xenia private payment links. PROOF Privacy Cohort 01 held its Demo Day on 22 September. Seven teams presented privacy products built on Starknet to VCs: Chance (@Chance_): Agent verification layer with privacy Agama (@agamafinance): Private yield infrastructure Haven (@Haven_Hn_): Private neo-bank Roca Beneficiaries: Private payroll-linked credit Credi (@credilabs): Private credit markets DeFa (@defaprimitive): private invoicing credit for SMEs Helix Assets (@HelixAssets): Private liquidity infrastructure Further Starknet integrations and privacy rollouts are planned over the coming weeks, bringing more of these products into users’ hands. More ways to use Bitcoin The Bitcoin bridge at strkbtc.io is back following the pause, with Garden powering swaps. A current promotion offers zero bridge fees, subject to a 100 BTC limit. Garden announced routes connecting Starknet to 11+ networks. Almost 250 BTC is already being used in Starknet DeFi. You can explore BTC opportunities including staking, providing liquidity and using BTC as collateral to borrow USDC. You can also shield strkBTC and stake it to earn privately with Endur, whose staking page lists approximately 3.4% APY. Rates vary over time. Other opportunities Bitcoin Button: The game launched and concluded, offering $10,000 in strkBTC prizes across the last-press grand prize and two leaderboards. Prizes will be airdropped to eligible winners soon. Kaito creator campaign: The first epoch opened on 11 September, distributing $8,000 in USDC. Phase two starts on 16 October. Faucet: Refilled three times, with another round planned for later in October. Escape Saylor: Launching this week. Elsewhere on Starknet Paradigm’s request-for-quote network went live onchain through Paradex, bringing another source of options liquidity onto Starknet. Paradex also listed ZEC options and launched US500 options, its first RWA options market. Options open interest passed $300 million as the platform reported new highs in daily options users. SuperVega reported weekly highs in premiums and launched $LIT year-end options. ArcX expanded its pre-TGE points markets, giving users a way to buy exposure to points before token launch. Variational points went live with a settlement structure capped at $40, with RiseX also now supported. Beyond trading, AEON enabled STRK merchant payments across India, Colombia, Mexico and markets in Africa, including support for local payment rails such as QR payments, bank transfers and mobile money. Starkscan launched Token Pages, bringing token rankings by value, prices and 24-hour volume into the explorer alongside the network activity users already follow. And Bramble (@bramble_fi) arrived with a simple ambition: Everything Starknet. More room for product logic Starknet v0.14.4 is now live on Mainnet. Once audits are complete, the upgrade will enable larger SNIP-36 proofs, allowing applications to run up to 1.1 billion L2 gas of computation in a single proven transaction. Applications can use this to run significantly more product logic offchain and prove that it executed correctly on Starknet. The release also updates gas pricing and gateway APIs, with nodes and SNIP-36 provers required to upgrade. Advancements on the quantum frontier September’s ECDSA.Fail paper reported an 86.1% reduction from the challenge’s starting benchmark score for a quantum circuit component relevant to breaking the signatures used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. The open challenge, launched by Eigen Labs using validation code released by Google Quantum AI, drew more than 100 participants and their AI agents. Seven co-authors are from StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation. The work provides an independently checkable benchmark to inform cryptographic migration planning, but does not demonstrate an end-to-end quantum attack. Read StarkWare’s account of the research. Starknet’s upgradeable accounts also provide a path for users to adopt new signing schemes without changing their account address or moving their assets. A recent comparison of 10 networks across eight upgrade capabilities found Starknet supported all eight. Read the analysis. StarkWare, Yukon Research and Eigen Labs are also running the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Autoresearch Challenge. The estimated compute cost of a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction has fallen from around $320 to $59, with a further $18,000 in prizes available to push it lower. These figures are benchmark-based research estimates under specific hardware and modelling assumptions. Explore the challenge and benchmark. Privacy across more products. More ways to use Bitcoin. More computation inside a single proven transaction. Accounts designed to adapt as cryptography changes. September advanced each of them. Q4 gives us plenty more to build on. (Historical earnings: For 2026Q2 (period ended 2026-06-30), Alphabet reported basic EPS of 14.41, diluted EPS of 14.24, net income of USD 174.771 billion, and revenue of USD 229.692 billion. In the prior-year period (2025Q2), basic EPS was 5.16, diluted EPS was 5.12, net income was USD 62.736 billion, and revenue was USD 186.662 billion. For 2026Q1, basic EPS was 5.17, diluted EPS was 5.11, net income was USD 62.578 billion, and revenue was USD 109.896 billion. Consensus expectations: For 2026Q3, consensus EPS estimate is 3.1255 and revenue estimate is USD 131.353 billion. For 2026Q4, consensus EPS estimate is 3.4628 and revenue estimate is USD 146.133 billion.)