RIADeFi
Refusal file · other

Why Ketju rejected StarkGate (Starknet Bridge)

Memo v1Published by Ketju Research

A registry memo, published verbatim and versioned. Superseded versions are recorded, never edited away. A rejection is a judgment for Ketju's client base and thesis, not a universal safety claim. Not investment, legal, tax, or compliance advice.

The memo

REJECTED ON A RECENT, NOT YET RESOLVED, RELIABILITY GAP — THE NARROWEST REJECTION IN THIS BATCH. Starknet is a Stage 1 ZK rollup, confirmed directly from L2Beat: the same rating Base holds, with a comparably structured governance split between a 2-of-6 StarkWare multisig routing normal actions through an eight-day on-chain timelock and a 9-of-12 Security Council that can upgrade instantly for emergencies only, the same zero-delay-once-invoked shape already priced into Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism's caps in this registry. What keeps this at zero is the incident record: two mainnet halts in a four-month span, September 2025 and 2026-01-05, neither losing user funds but both stopping block production outright. Roughly seven months have passed clean since the more recent one at this review, short of the twelve-month bar this registry applies elsewhere. This is the closest case to a near-term reopen in the whole bridges batch, not a structural disqualification.

What would reopen the file

  • Twelve consecutive months with no mainnet halt or block-production outage, counted from the 2026-01-05 incident
  • Any future major protocol upgrade is accompanied by a public pre-mortem or rollback plan, reducing recurrence risk
  • StarkWare Multisig or Security Council composition or threshold changes are publicly disclosed within 48 hours
  • Any confirmed exploit of the StarkGate bridge contracts themselves

Facts on file

Verdict
Rejected
Exposure
other
Chains examined
Ethereum
Memo version
v1
Reviewed
Next review

← All published refusals