Starknet Foundation and Argent Form Startup Studio

As the bear market grinds on, blockchain teams are looking for new ways to attract developers.

One example is a startup studio formed as a partnership between Argent, a crypto wallet, and the Starknet Foundation, an organization founded in November 2022 to support the Starknet ecosystem.

With its parent company StarkWare Industries having raised $273M, Starknet is a major player in the Ethereum scaling space.

The new outfit, called Hito Studios, will serve to bridge startups on their way to raising funding, Itamar Lessuise, co-founder and CEO at Argent, told The Defiant.

“We’ll be working very closely with the teams,” he said. “The goal is really to help them with every aspect of building the product, from software engineering to smart contract work, security to product market fit and marketing.”

Lessuise said that he expects teams to work with Hito for 12 months or more.

Hito Studios launches at a time when venture funding for crypto startups has largely dried up — a study from Crunchbase released in April noted that funding for web3 startups was down 82% year-over-year.

Argent is a wallet specifically focused on the Starknet ecosystem, which has over a million users, according to a document shared with The Defiant.

Lessuise noted that Starknet is at a point where it is truly ready for developers. “It’s a tipping point. If you had been in the ecosystem six or nine months ago, I would have said it’s still on the horizon. Now, it’s really time to build.”

Lessuise added that Starknet’s technology is sufficiently mature. “It’s less about the infrastructure,” he said. “It’s more about the app layer.”