Starknet’s Grinta upgrade is massive, but arrived with turbulence

The layer-2’s biggest release yet brings benefits — but a post-upgrade outage caused a chain reorg

article-image

Starknet and Adobe modified by Blockworks

share

Starknet’s most ambitious upgrade to date has gone live, but it promptly reminded users of the risks of pushing cutting-edge infrastructure into production.

The layer-2 network rolled out its Grinta upgrade earlier this month, a sweeping release that touches nearly every layer of its architecture. Among the headline features:

  • Instant transactions with ~0.5 second pre-confirmations, bringing a “Web2-like” user experience.
  • Seven-times faster block production, reducing latency for DeFi, gaming, and AI applications.
  • A new fee market modeled on Ethereum’s EIP-1559, with STRK as the default gas token. Paymasters can still let users pay in ETH or stablecoins.
  • The first step toward sequencer decentralization, with three sequencers sharing responsibility instead of a single centralized one.
  • A mempool upgrade that lets users prioritize transactions by fee, akin to Ethereum’s gas bidding.
  • A standardized Paymaster API (SNIP-29) to simplify integration for wallets and dApps.

StarkWare, the team behind Starknet, framed the release as a historic milestone. “Starknet is moving from a centralized network to a credibly neutral, performant network ready to onboard millions of users,” the project said in its Grinta announcement.

Outage overshadows launch

But the triumph was quickly tempered. On September 2, just after Grinta’s debut, Starknet went offline for more than two hours. A chain reorganization wiped transactions submitted during a roughly two-hour window, frustrating users and raising questions about rollout strategy.

According to the incident report published today, the root cause was “ungraceful recovery from earlier P2P issues on the Ethereum network.” Specifically, the sequencer processed an unprovable stream of transactions, forcing a rollback.

Developers acknowledged the severity: “It sucks, plain and simple,” StarkWare contributor Abdelhamid Bakhta wrote on X. He emphasized, however, that “no one has decentralized a ZK rollup architecture on a live chain before. Setbacks come with the territory, but they drive progress.”

The upgrade’s scale contributed to the risk. StarkWare batched multiple features into a single release, rather than phasing them in. “Usually when we know there is a major upgrade coming that will anyway require a short downtime, we prefer to batch multiple features,” Bakhta explained in response to community criticism. Strategically, he added, the team wanted Grinta live ahead of “something important coming very soon related to the Bitcoin plans.”

Reaction was mixed. Bakhta compared the episode to Solana’s repeated outages — a network that nevertheless retained developer momentum. “Bullish on Starknet downtime. Solana playbook, all planned,” he quipped. Others noted the irony of a rollup, whose very selling point is Ethereum-grade reliability, suffering downtime.

Researcher Eric Wall, a StarkWare advisor, pressed why the rollout wasn’t staged more carefully. Bakhta countered that progress in uncharted ZK rollup design comes with inevitable turbulence.

Despite the hiccup, Grinta marks a turning point. Starknet is now the first rollup to decentralize sequencing in production, technically, although all sequencers operated by StarkWare for now. Future phases will bring in independent operators, aiming to improve censorship resistance, reliability, and throughput.

As the outage fades from memory, the scope of the upgrade should come to the fore. As Bakhta put it: “We’re humbled by the issues, but proud of what we’ve achieved. Let’s fix it, learn from it, and keep building.”


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 24 - 26, 2026

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template.png

Research

The march toward an interoperable and onchain-by-default internet depends on reliable messaging and value transfer across heterogeneous domains. Crosschain protocols now process >$1.3T in combined annual transfer volume and secure tens of millions of user interactions, yet no single design dominates.

article-image

The goal, per Santiago Santos, is to make crypto a relatable piece of tech for people who may not even understand it

article-image

Stripe stablecoin unit aims to operate under a federal charter enabling regulated stablecoin issuance and custody services

by Blockworks /
article-image

Will TradFi make crypto better or create more problems than it solves?

article-image

Subtle decisions by risk curators saved Aave from significant turmoil

article-image

The new Rootstock Institutional unit aims to connect professional investors to Bitcoin-native yield and liquidity strategies anchored in BTC’s security layer

by Blockworks /
article-image

DOJ files record civil forfeiture against more than 127,000 BTC linked to scam activity

by Blockworks /