The Starknet Foundation announced the launch of the Starknet Advancement Program to support established teams in launching games on the Starknet mainnet or application chain. The program will match the network fees incurred by the game and credit them to the game developer's account, with a maximum reward of $1 million per game within a year. The first 20 game applications will open on April 26th and close on May 17th, lasting for three weeks.

Starknet Foundation announced on the X platform that they will be airdropping STRK tokens to three groups of users, including:1. Stakers: The Foundation originally planned to distribute STRK tokens to eligible stakers through the staking protocols used by users. Although many protocols were unable to complete the distribution task, the currently supported protocols or entities include: Lido, Rocket Pool, BloxStaking, SharedStake, stakefish, Consensys, and Ankr Staking. Stakers who stake through these protocols and are recognized by the Starknet Foundation as eligible for Provisions will be able to claim their STRK tokens directly through the Provisions portal.2. StarkEx users who were mistakenly identified as VeVe users: Immutable users who were identified as non-VeVe users in the update list received by the Foundation from Immutable will be able to claim their STRK tokens through the portal.3. VeVe users: Discussions with VeVe regarding token distribution are ongoing.

Starknet announced on the X platform that version V0.13.1.1 will be released soon based on the needs of its users. The highlight of this upgrade is a significant reduction in contract declaration fees, which will be reduced to 1/30 of the previous cost, effectively lowering the cost for developers deploying contracts on Starknet. The upgrade schedule for 0.13.1.1 is as follows: - Sepolia Testnet: April 8th (Monday); - Mainnet: April 15th (Monday). Starknet reminds all users running full nodes to upgrade their node software as soon as possible. Currently, Juno V0.11.4 and Pathfinder V0.11.5 both support Starknet V0.13.1.1.

The Starknet Goerli testnet will be deprecated on April 11th. Users and developers can migrate to Starknet Sepolia. The methods to obtain Starknet Sepolia tokens include using Sepolia StarkGate for cross-chain from L1 and using Sepolia Faucets.

The Starknet Foundation is introducing optimizations parallel to the Ethereum Dencun upgrade aimed at significantly reducing transaction fees on layer 2 networks. These measures include the release of version 0.13.1 of Starknet today, which will utilize EIP-4844 after Dencun goes live on the mainnet tomorrow. This update will transition Starknet from using the costly "calldata" method for data transactions to the cost-effective "blob" transaction type, providing a direct avenue for cost reduction. These blob transactions, also known as EIP-4844 (or proto-danksharding), are planned to go live on the Ethereum mainnet and activate the Dencun upgrade at 13:55 UTC tomorrow, 269568 time. Blobs will become an additional feature on the network, improving data availability without affecting existing Ethereum infrastructure, thus enabling cheaper transactions on layer 2 aggregators like Starknet.

The Starknet Foundation announced the establishment of a Game Committee, which is composed of six experts and is responsible for promoting the growth of games on Starknet. The committee's role includes analyzing, developing strategies, and recommending plans to expand Starknet's gaming ecosystem, the success of which will be measured by metrics such as daily active users, retention rates, and revenue. The committee members are appointed by the Starknet Foundation's board of directors and include Henri Lieutaud from the Starknet Foundation, Oli Freuler from Starkware, Gabin Marignier from Focus Tree, Chris Lexmond from Unstoppable Games, Tarrence van As from Cartridge, and Loaf from Loot Realms.

The market shows STRK has broken through $2 and is now trading at $2.26, with a daily increase of 22%. The market fluctuations are significant, so please be prepared for risk control. STRK's market value has reached $1,595,694,322, with a 24-hour trading volume of $669,345,635.

Polygon's Ethereum-compatible solution based on STARK, Polygon Miden, will launch its Builder testnet on March 24.

According to Dune data, the Ethereum Layer2 scaling solution Starknet has bridged a user volume of 1,223,805 and a bridged storage value of 874,732 ETH.

According to Voyager data from the Starknet blockchain browser, currently over 444 million STRK airdrop tokens have been claimed, accounting for approximately 75.7% of the total airdrop amount.