The Starknet Foundation opened a non-binding poll on October 15, 2026, asking holders and delegators of staked STRK tokens whether Starknet should research leaving Ethereum to run as an independent post-quantum blockchain. Unchained reported, citing the proposal text, that a Yes result would lead only to research and that any decision to make the move would require a separate governance process.
As a layer 2 network, Starknet executes transactions itself and settles them on Ethereum, where it publishes its state data. The Starknet Foundation has said it can make the parts of Starknet under its own control quantum-resistant soon, but the network’s bridge to Ethereum and its data publication depend on Ethereum’s own migration. The Ethereum Foundation has targeted December 2029 for that migration.
Disclosure: Quantum Observer’s Editor-in-Chief Marin Ivezic is an advisor to Project Eleven, which works on post-quantum security for digital assets.
The poll
The Snapshot poll opened at 09:32 UTC on October 15 and closes at 09:32 UTC on October 22. By 14:40 UTC on the first day, voters had cast 293 votes totaling about 179.8 million STRK in voting power, 99.9% of it in favor of research, according to Unchained. The poll has no quorum requirement.
Henri of the Starknet Foundation, who posts as henrli, set out the reasoning in a forum post. By becoming an independent layer 1, he wrote, Starknet would remove its dependency on Ethereum’s timeline, though “no timeline for that exists yet.” He wrote that STRK would remain the token whatever the outcome and that the bridges from Ethereum would stay open.
One commenter in the forum, posting as ceri1, questioned whether Starknet’s current staking set could replace the security Ethereum provides. In mid-October, the STRK staked on Starknet was worth roughly $100 million. About 43.7 million ETH was staked on Ethereum, worth about $103 billion at the October 15 price.
StarkWare’s case
StarkWare, the company that builds Starknet, raised the idea on October 8. Chief executive Eli Ben-Sasson asked on X whether becoming a layer 1 for post-quantum agility was a good or a bad idea. He wrote that as a layer 2, Starknet can be only as quantum-safe as Ethereum, Decrypt reported.
On the same day, Starknet’s own account posted that it was considering the move. It said that by doing so, Starknet would become the first fully quantum-resistant network, “with 2027 as our target.” “Quantum-proofing crypto is urgent, so we must move at lightning speed,” Ben-Sasson told Cointelegraph.
The two roadmaps
The June 30 text of StarkWare’s three-phase post-quantum roadmap for Starknet did not mention becoming a layer 1. In the first two phases, StarkWare replaces the Pedersen hash function with BLAKE2 and migrates existing contracts, steps within Starknet’s control. The third phase covers two dependencies on Ethereum – the elliptic-curve operations that support the Ethereum bridge and messaging, and the commitments over the state data Starknet publishes on Ethereum.
The Ethereum Foundation’s protocol team said on September 7 that it aims to make Ethereum quantum-resistant across its execution, consensus, and data layers by December 2029. The team plans for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer as early as 2030, an assumption it called deliberately aggressive. It will treat the 2029 date as fixed until a reassessment with outside experts in January 2027.
Update, October 22, 2026: The poll closed with 93.52% of voting power in favor of research, Cointelegraph reported. Any move to an independent layer 1 would require a further vote.
