I "Stepped Down" as Head of Ecosystem at StarkWare, But I'm Not Fucking Leaving Starknet. Earlier today I announced I was stepping down as Head of Ecosystem. Messages flooded in. People assumed the worst: Abdel is out, leaving StarkWare, abandoning Starknet. They got it wrong. I'm not leaving StarkWare. Not even close. I'm shifting roles to something that hits closer to the core of why I wake up every day. My new title: Head of Freedom Tech. My focus: weaponize ZK-STARKs to build tools that hand sovereignty back to individuals. Privacy that can't be stripped away. Money that can't be frozen. Identity that can't be tracked. Speech that can't be silenced. Back to the roots. Starknet will be the execution layer where verifiable computation scales to billions. Where math enforces integrity without trusting anyone. Where Bitcoin's promise finally escapes its own chains and becomes universal. Because Bitcoin showed the world that code can route around institutions. But code needs more than conviction to survive. It needs an economy that pays for itself, incentives that align builders with users, infrastructure that power can't starve. ZK is the missing primitive. Proofs that convince without revealing. Computation that anyone can verify, yet no one can fake. This is how we flip the asymmetry. Thirty years ago, a handful of visionaries saw this coming. In 1993, Eric Hughes wrote that privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. He warned we couldn't expect governments or corporations to grant us privacy out of kindness. It profits them to watch us. So we must defend it ourselves, with cryptography, with anonymous systems, with code we write and release into the wild. ...