STRK Falls Double Digits From a 214% Rally as 127M Unlock Nears

Starknet's STRK fell double digits on Monday, cutting into a monthly rally that had run past 200%, with the network's next token unlock now two days away.

Snapshots from different venues put the 24-hour decline between 13% and 28% and the price between $0.08675 and $0.0958, depending on the hour the reading was taken. The slide followed an intraday high of $0.1265 on October 11, STRK's highest print since early December. Even after the drop, the token still held a monthly gain of roughly 202% to 214% across the readings reviewed.

The broader crypto market retreated over the same window, and there is no reported project-specific event behind the fall, such as a security breach or a technical failure. What is scheduled is an unlock.

Positioning was stretched before the move. In an October 11 snapshot, STRK futures open interest stood near $258.5 million, 24-hour futures volume near $3.5 billion, and roughly $14.8 million of futures liquidations had been booked over the day. Spot volume that day ran around $720 million against a market capitalization of about $892 million.

127 Million STRK Unlocks on October 15

Tokenomist's Starknet page lists the next scheduled unlock for October 15, 2026: 127.00 million STRK across two allocations, equal to 3.37% of released supply and marked at $11.01 million. The tokens come from the early contributor and investor allocations, the two largest buckets on the schedule at 20.04% and 18.17% of supply.

September's tranche is the cleaner comparison. It was also 127 million STRK, valued at $3.7 million on its unlock date, and reported at 1.71% of circulating supply, a different base from the 3.37% of released supply the tracker quotes now. The token count is identical and the dollar value is roughly three times higher, because the price did the work.

The schedule releases up to 127 million STRK a month to early contributors and investors through March 2027. The same tracker puts Starknet's raise at $273 million across six rounds from 32 investors, and the token 37.74% through its release schedule, with 3.8 billion of a 10 billion total supply already released.

The Rally Started With a Layer 1 Proposal

Starknet said in an October 8 post that it is actively considering becoming a Layer 1, which it said would make it the first fully quantum-resistant network, with 2027 as the target. The post set out a consideration and a target, not an approved migration: the technical details and a formal transition plan are yet to be established.

The quantum groundwork predates the post. StarkWare published a three-phase quantum readiness roadmap on June 30, 2026. The first two phases sit within Starknet's control, with committed time estimates; the third documents dependencies on Ethereum's own migration timeline. That third phase covers the bridge's messaging layer and blob data availability, both of which rely on elliptic-curve cryptography.

Starknet's account and settlement layers do not rely on quantum-vulnerable cryptography, according to that roadmap, and STARKs rest on collision-resistant hash functions rather than elliptic-curve arithmetic. Account abstraction lets contracts be made quantum-resistant without protocol-level breaking changes, and users can deploy a post-quantum wallet on the network today. StarkWare adds that all protocol-level changes are subject to governance approval and that no timeline or outcome is guaranteed.

Eli Ben-Sasson, StarkWare's CEO, has framed the L1 question as a way for Starknet to control its own security upgrades instead of waiting on Ethereum, whose roadmap targets core post-quantum infrastructure around 2029.

The Chain Grew Less Than the Price

The rally ran well ahead of the network's usage. On-chain activity and DeFi TVL grew far less than the token over the same stretch. Even at the October 11 high of $0.1265, STRK sat more than 97% below its February 2024 all-time high of $4.41.

The reference points from here are that October 11 high and the recent range low at $0.0900. The unlock lands on October 15, and any move to a Layer 1 needs governance approval before it needs an architecture.