News08 October, 20263 min read

Starknet's boss said "we're not leaving Ethereum." A year later, an exit is on the table

Ethereum's security helped sell Starknet, but its upgrade schedule could now push the network away.

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Starknet is considering a future outside Ethereum as it looks for more control over security upgrades, a little more than a year after StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson said the network wasn't leaving.

Ben-Sasson, the co-founder and chief executive of StarkWare, the company that develops Starknet, said in an Oct. 8 post on X that turning Starknet into a standalone Layer-1 is now among the options being studied.

Starknet becoming an L1 for post-quantum agility: good idea or bad idea? Two giant elements we need to pay attention to: (1) The quantum threat. It may be MUCH closer than we think. (2) AI. It's becoming more powerful than we can process. Is anyone willing to bet how much time we have until AI breaks something that we considered as safe? This calls for "bunker mode". Chains need to become future-proofed. And fast. Here's what it takes to make a chain truly future-proofed: - The right cryptography - Crypto agility - Becoming an L1 This connects to what I talked about in my Token2049 talk today. Here's the summary: 🧵— Eli Ben-Sasson | Starknet.io (@EliBenSasson) October 8, 2026

The idea is still only under consideration
Ben-Sasson linked the review to Starknet's work on quantum-resistant cryptography and the growing concern that advances in artificial intelligence could speed up attacks on existing cryptographic systems.

Starknet currently waits on Ethereum for part of the upgrade

Starknet runs today as an Ethereum Layer-2. It processes transactions separately, then posts proofs and data back to Ethereum, which acts as its settlement layer.

That gives Starknet access to Ethereum's security, but it also means some parts of Starknet's own security roadmap depend on changes Ethereum controls.

StarkWare laid that out in a June 30 post-quantum roadmap. The company said Starknet can handle several parts of its migration independently, including account authorization and changes to its own protocol cryptography.

But two areas still remain tied to Ethereum, including the bridge between the networks and the data-availability system Starknet uses when it posts data to Ethereum.

StarkWare described that final phase as moving "in step with Ethereum," while its public migration register says bridge and messaging changes depend on Ethereum's own post-quantum migration.

A standalone L1 could remove some of those external dependencies and give Starknet more control over when security changes are activated. But it would also change the settlement model users rely on today, since Starknet would no longer be relying on Ethereum in the same way.

A year ago, Ben-Sasson said Starknet wasn't leaving

The possibility marks a noticeable U-turn from Ben-Sasson's public position last year. Speaking to crypto outlet Decrypt in September 2025 about Starknet's push into Bitcoin-based finance, he said, "We're not leaving Ethereum."

At the time, Ben-Sasson said Starknet's priority for 2025 and 2026 was to serve Bitcoin as effectively as possible.

Starknet's published roadmap still reflects that older direction as its final phase currently lists "full settlement on Bitcoin + Ethereum," rather than a fully independent base layer.

Ethereum has its own quantum deadline

Ethereum, meanwhile, is working on a post-quantum migration of its own.

The Ethereum Foundation's protocol team said on Sept. 7 that it is targeting December 2029 for making Ethereum's execution, consensus and data layers resistant to quantum attacks.

The team called that deadline deliberately aggressive and said Ethereum should plan around the possibility that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer could arrive as early as 2030.

"Q-day cannot be scheduled," the Ethereum Foundation wrote, using the industry term for the point when a quantum computer becomes capable of breaking widely used cryptography. "So we have assigned ourselves a self-imposed deadline."

StarkWare has argued that Starknet can move faster on parts of the problem because its STARK proving system is already based on hash-based cryptography and its account system lets users adopt different signature schemes without waiting for a network-wide fork.

But its Ethereum-facing components remain the part it can't fully schedule itself.

The Coinformer reached out to Starknet and Eli Ben-Sasson but didn't hear back.

Ethereum