Yahya 
The best-developed initiatives on the network will get 20 million Starknet (STRK) tokens from the Starknet Foundation. The Starknet Foundation will gift the 21 best-performing projects in the ecosystem about $25.2 million worth of Starknet tokens as part of its new Catalyst initiative.
Criteria for Selection and Project Categories
According to Diego Oliva, the CEO of Starknet Foundation, the program has been selected to honor the top user-facing protocols depending on many criteria, which were weighed by the Stark Foundation together with an impartial third party.
“We examined a spectrum of metrics with varying weights, including total value locked, fees generated, active users, external funding, security audits, as well as several other metrics.” Based on zero-knowledge roll-up technology, the awards program seeks to spur invention on Starknet’s Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution. Out of the grants, two categories will distinguish advanced-stage ventures from newly developing initiatives on the network.
Ekubo, a token launch platform; AVNU, a DeFi protocol with gasless trading; Influence, a totally on-chain grand strategy game; Realms, an on-chain gaming universe; Nostra, a DeFi protocol with an upcoming crypto super app, and ZKX, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange, rank the first six best-performing projects that qualified for the grants.
One of the top developing use cases for Starknet is Web3 gaming, for which the network will keep developing cheap transaction-cost high-speed infrastructure. As Oliva advised,
“Starknet has launched and will keep releasing a set of enhancements targeted at increasing transaction speeds, lowering latency, and lowering transaction costs. This helps on-chain gaming as well as DeFi apps, another category of apps that Starknet finds to be quite popular.” Oliva wants to see the funding program inspire additional innovative blockchain use cases on the network, outside gaming, and distributed finance (DeFi).
With almost $1.08 billion in total value locked (TVL) and a 2.32% market share, Starknet is the seventh-largest Ethereum layer 2, according to L2beat. The combined TVL of Ethereum layer-2 networks exceeds $46 billion.
Three weeks after the announcement of a $5 million seed grant program aimed at supporting at least 200 outstanding teams with $25,000 USD Coin each, providing a “final push” to assist final-stage projects launch on Starknet, the new financing initiative for developers emerges. The Starknet Foundation also schedules future funding initiatives under the Catalyst program.