Starknet's Student Boom

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1. 🕵️ Clanker Cuts Ties With Ex-Velodrome Thief. The token launcher parted ways with team member "proxystudio" after discovering he was Gabagool, the ex-Velodrome contributor who stole $350k in 2022. Clanker said no assets were affected and operations remain unchanged.
2. 👾 The Duper Bowl Is Live. Onchain strategy game Duper just kicked off its two-week tournament, the Duper Bowl, with over $7k in prizes. Players earn by playing ranked games on Abstract, with playoffs and finals set for May 14th–16th.
3. 🌱 Lens Spring Hackathon Begins. Lens is back with a fresh $55k hackathon running May 5th–20th, inviting devs to build across SocialFi, AI, gaming, and more on Lens Chain. The top prize is 20,000 $GHO, with a bonus track for smart media apps via Bonsai.

Starknet’s prowess has largely coalesced around two poles so far: capital‑efficient DeFi and fully onchain games.

Yet the Starknet tech stack, including the Cairo VM, STARK proofs, and various community tools, make for quite a general‑purpose canvas. Imagination is the main limitation here.

In other words, you can do much more on Starknet than strictly financial or gaming use cases.

That said, a project demonstrating Starknet's consumer crypto potential right now is Focus Tree, a student productivity app that's recently paved the way for its +1 million mobile users to join Starknet's frontier via streamlined wallets.

Focus  Tree’s core loop is straightforward. Open the app, set a study timer, and stay off your phone. Nail the session and you mint a “tile” item, i.e. an NFT, straight into an auto‑generated smart account. You can use these tiles to decorate your own personal "digital garden" over time.

The underlying wallet is deployed invisibly via account abstraction, and AVNU's Paymaster tech fronts all the gas for transactions, so the vast majority of users here have no idea they're using crypto tech whatsoever.

Indeed, there are no seed phrases, no $STRK gas top‑ups, no confirmation pop‑ups. The end‑user flow feels like a regular normie app, just with the added benefit of onchain receipts, portability, etc.

This UX setup is translating into onchain gravity, too. Over the past week, the app facilitated the creation of more than 140,000 new wallets (!) and executed more than 170k sponsored transactions for just over $200 in gas.

Furthermore, since April 24th, Focus Tree users have represented ~90% of all daily active Starknet addresses, handily making it the network’s primary driver of activity lately. Plain and simple, this is a case study in how a well‑designed consumer app can take off onchain.

There's more to come here, too.

AVNU plans to open‑source its entire Paymaster stack in the coming weeks, so soon developers will be able to fork the infra, sponsor fees, and let users pay for transactions in any token.

This isn't the only Paymaster live on Starknet either; Cartridge also offers one, and it's also poised for growing adoption.

As such, I think it's fair to assume we're on the verge of a new wave of gas‑abstracted social apps, casual games, and even enterprise tools on Starknet. Focus Tree is a glaring signal of what's to come here, so keep it on your radar!

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