The near-unanimous early tally rests on 293 votes with no quorum to clear, and a yes authorizes research rather than a transition. StarkWare's stated reason is that Starknet's bridge to Ethereum and its data availability layer follow Ethereum's upgrade timeline rather than its own.
Starknet opened a seven-day poll on Thursday asking its token holders whether the network should research becoming an independent Layer 1 instead of remaining an Ethereum rollup, with quantum computing given as the reason. The Snapshot poll opened at 09:32 UTC and closes on October 22, and the electorate is STRK stakers and delegators.
The question is narrower than it sounds. Voters are being asked whether the move should be researched, not whether it should happen. The proposal states that support "does not constitute approval of a transition to an L1" and that any later move would need "a dedicated governance process," in the wording Unchained quoted. The ballot offers three options, backing the research, opposing it, or neutral, and the poll is non-binding with no quorum to clear.
Early support is near-total and thinly counted. Roughly 179.8 million units of voting power had been cast across 293 votes as of about 14:40 UTC on Thursday, 99.9% of it for research, Unchained reported. The Block recorded 177.6 million and 99.91% at an earlier point the same day. Both are snapshots of a running tally rather than a result, and with no quorum and an electorate limited to stakers and delegators, the margin measures enthusiasm among those who turned out, not the outcome of the binding vote a transition would require.
The technical argument is about what Starknet does not control. Its proofs are hash-based STARKs, and its accounts can adopt post-quantum signatures without a protocol upgrade, The Block reported, so the parts StarkWare builds could be hardened on their own schedule. The bridge to Ethereum and the data availability layer cannot, because both follow Ethereum's upgrade timeline. A Starknet Foundation contributor named Henri argues that running as an independent Layer 1 removes that dependence, Unchained reported.
That timeline is public. Ethereum has set December 2029 as its deadline for post-quantum readiness and called it non-negotiable, a schedule that implies a hard fork roughly every seven months and whose next fork, Hegotá, carries no post-quantum code at all. Starknet had earlier named 2027 as its own target for full quantum resistance, Unchained reported, roughly two to three years earlier than the deadline of the chain it settles on.
An independent chain would have to secure itself. Starknet already runs STRK staking, which is how this poll defines who may vote, and the proposal keeps STRK as the only token, with bridges from Ethereum staying open. Neither report sets out how validation and settlement would work without Ethereum underneath, which is the work a vote for research would commission.
Eli Ben-Sasson, StarkWare's co-founder and chief executive, raised the idea on October 8, arguing that a chain needs the right cryptography and the ability to upgrade it. "Becoming an L1 is a big deal. So is post-quantum security. We want to hear what the community thinks," he wrote on X, in the post Unchained quoted. Two days later StarkWare said that "Starknet becoming an independent L1 is our clearest path forward," a firmer position than a research poll implies. StarkWare has set no timeline for a transition, and said a vote against would leave the post-quantum work on the existing Layer 2 path.
Whether that deadline leaves enough margin is contested among Ethereum researchers rather than settled. Justin Drake has argued that ECDSA could break before quantum computers arrive, pointing at machine-generated mathematics, and Vitalik Buterin has said that AI-assisted math could weaken lattice cryptography within two years, naming ML-DSA and fully homomorphic encryption as the exposure. Both arguments point toward hash-based schemes, which is where Starknet's proofs already sit.
Starknet's proposal also lands in a month when other Ethereum rollups have been leaving the model for a different reason. Blast and Abstract both announced wind-downs in early October after deciding their chains could not cover their costs. The reason Starknet has put to its holders is not economic: it is cryptography the team cannot reach on its own schedule.
The poll closes on October 22. What it settles is whether StarkWare's engineers write the detailed proposals and put them to further votes. Leaving Ethereum, if it is ever put to holders, is a separate decision with no date attached to it.
