Recently, the public criticism of Starknet by the Solana community has sparked quite a bit of discussion. The data that has surfaced is indeed eye-catching—some public chains have daily active users in the single digits, and their trading volumes are even more dismal, yet they hold valuations in the hundreds of millions, unable to deliver corresponding results. Behind this "smear campaign" exposes a bigger problem.

It's not just Starknet. Looking at the entire public chain ecosystem, names like Movement, Blast, Story, ZetaChain, Zora, and Flow, many have long had zero revenue. Some projects raised a lot during early funding stages but turned into shells. This is somewhat similar to the ghost city logic in China—building the infrastructure but not attracting users.

In plain terms, the ceiling for the public chain track is indeed high, with inherent traffic effects, which is why the competition is so fierce. But the reality is: the three main DeFi applications, stablecoin payments, NFTs, prediction markets, and perpetual trading have long been divided up. What about new innovative applications? Very few.

Ironically, the infrastructure supply of Layer1 and Layer2 is growing exponentially, while actual user demand is highly concentrated on just a few chains. When the market cools down, this mismatch between supply and demand will be ruthlessly exposed. Some projects might even go to zero by 2026, which would be nothing unusual.