bought $740k of starknet this week (yes, seriously). here's the thinking, and i'll say up front that this is one of the grossest charts i've ever seen and makes me want to throw up. it's down about 99% from the launch highs and it's been down only for 2.5 years. i'd guess 99 out of 100 people who know what it is, hate it, and based on the pa i don't blame them at all. price leads narrative, so when a chart looks like that nobody has anything nice to say about it. that's kind of why i'm here. chart starting to look bulla: i'm seeing big bullish div on the weekly as well as rsi back above 50 and is currently retesting. price is curling up and building a base. to me that has the makings of a long term major bottom. narrative: "programmable zcash" zcash led this cycle and near ran after it as the next privacy play, and i think starknet could be third in line. there are deep connections between zcash cofounders and the starknet team. starknet shipped native privacy in june, so you can shield basically any token on the chain, and there's a private version of bitcoin on there too. the proofs it runs on are quantum resistant (nice buzzword for the future). there's also a proposal called ztarknet to build a starknet style layer 2 directly on top of zcash. so the simple version is it is "programmable zcash", zcash's little brother sitting at 315m mcap. this reminds me a lot of near. i bought about $2m of near around a $1.40 back in march and april. literally no one was talking about it, let alone buying it and most of my replies were some version of: "why near? it's a 2021 shitcoin that's down only, you're throwing your money away" now everyone loves near. the chart then looked a lot like the strk chart does now. it went on to roughly 3x from there in 6 months. too bad i didn't hold it. i got shaken out, which was bad execution on my part, but the thesis played out. the big difference is that near had intents, a product people actually used and adds value. starknet doesn't have that yet. hardly anyone uses the chain, revenue is basically nothing, and there's no app people care about. but these guys are well funded and seem to be shipping new things. where i could see a real product gain traction is private trading. on hyperliquid every wallet and every trade is public, so people get copy traded, whales get hunted, wallets get flagged. i think there's a market for a dex where you keep your own keys and nobody can see your positions. some of that is already live on starknet, private swaps and private perps, it just doesn't have users yet. and every private transaction costs 4 strk, so if that ever gets real usage the token is right in the path of it. i also played around with an options app on starknet called supervega for a few minutes. haven't placed a trade but the ui was clean. the token unlocks have been the main reason to hate the coin. 127m tokens a month. here's the good news, there are only 6 unlocks left and the last one is march of 2027. each one is around $5.5m at current prices and about 74% of supply is already out. the september one got absorbed without a problem. feels to me like the sellers are mostly done. the market usually front runs these things. last thing. if this does get going it has the potential to be a hated rally, and i kind of like that. a lot of people will want to fade it or short it because of what it did to them, and that kind of thing gets a coin talked about and can push a move further than it would normally go. the risks are obvious (mainly, no real usage). time will tell if i have gone full schizo, or if this will be a nice play. we'll see.