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StarkWare Industries

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StarkWare Industries
Company typePrivate company
Industryblockchain
Founded2018; 6 years ago (2018)
Founders
  • Eli Ben-Sasson
  • Uri Kolodny
  • Michael Riabzev
  • Alessandro Chiesa
Headquarters
Netanya
,
Israel
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Eli Ben-Sasson (President)
Uri Kolodny (CEO)
ProductsStarkEx, Cairo, StarkNet
Number of employees
70
Websitestarkware.co

StarkWare Industries is an IsraelI software company that specializes in cryptography. It develops zero-knowledge proof technology that compresses information in order to address the scalability problem of the blockchain, and works on the Ethereum platform.[1] In May 2022 the company's estimated value was $8 billion, an increase from $2 billion six months earlier.[2]

History

StarkWare Industries founded in 2018 by Eli Ben-Sasson (President) from the Technion, one of the founders of Zcash,[3][4] his former phd. student Michael Riabzev, Uri Kolodny (CEO) and Alessandro Chiesa from UC Berkeley (chief scientist). [5] In April 2019 the Technion sued Ben-Sasson and Riabazev for violating its Intellectual property[6] The institute claimed that Ben-Sasson established StarkWare clandestinely, to his academic research without consent and demand 50% of his stake in the company. Ben-Sasson claimed that he didn't use any invention belonging to the Technion, merely based on StarkWares’ employees knowledge.[7] In 2020 the two sides reached an agreement and Ben-Sasson left the Technion.[5][8]

Starkware raised $6 million in seed money and afterwards $30 million in series A round led by Paradigm, VC fund by Fred Ehrsam.[9] Other participants were Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, Coinbase and Vitalik Buterin.[10] In March 2021 the company raised $75 million in series B round. It was led by Paradigm, along with other VC's such as Sequoia, DCVC, Pantera Capital, Wing, Alameda Research, and Founders Fund. In addition it received $12 million from the Ethereum Foundation.[5] In November 2021 StarkWare raised $50 million in Series C round led by Sequoia, making its total raised money to $163 million and bringing its value to $2 billion, making it a Unicorn.[11] In May 2022 StarkWare raised 100 million in a Series D round led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue Management,[12] bringing its value to $8 billion. Series D carried out despite a bear market.[2]

Starkware's scientific advisors include: Avi Wigderson, Shafi Goldwasser, Noam Nisan and Madhu Sudan. The company's advisors Include: Balaji Srinivasan, Joseph Lubin, Naval Ravikant, and Tom Glocer.[13] The company employs 70 people [14] and located in Netanya.[10]

Technology

Starkware develops technology called STARK (scalable transparent ARgument of knowledge) to improve the scalability in the blockchain [7] It was founded on the basis of a theoretical research conducted by Ben-Sasson and Riabzev and others at the Technion in addition to mathematical models of zero knowledge proofs (ZKP).[8][15] The company develops technology based on this math to batch thousands transactions in a single batch, away from the basis layer of Ethereum. Each final update of each batch is written to Ethereum using a file of 80 kilobytes, which acts as proof for the content in the batch.[2] This compression process increases the amount of data that can be accepted on a block of the blockchain and minimizes the energy needed of each transaction.[16] The energy consumption per transaction reduces by 200,000 times.[17]

StarkWare first offered its technology in the form of StarkEx, a proprietary scaling engine which was launched on Ethereum in June 2020.[11] It is used by Sorare,[14] Dydx,[18] Immutable X,[19] the web browser Opera,[20] and DeversiFi.[8][2] In June 2021 StarkWare launched its second platform: StarkNet. Unlike StarkEx, which is available to clients, StarkNet is permissionless. Any developer can use it to build on it their scalable decentralized applications.[8] As of May 2022 there had been 100,000 downloads of developer tools to build on StarkNet.[2] StarkWare's systems are programmed in the CAIRO language, Turing complete programming language which was built by researchers and engineers from the company.[14]

See also

References

  1. ^ Kiran Mathur Mohammed (July 29, 2021). Eli Ben-Sasson develops technology to make blockchain 20,000 times cheaper. Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.
  2. ^ a b c d e Nina Bambysheva (May 25, 2022). Ethereum Scaling Company StarkWare Quadruples Valuation To $8 Billion Amid Bear Market. Forbes.
  3. ^ Founding Zcash scientists. Zcash site.
  4. ^ EB Sasson, A Chiesa, C Garman, M Green, I Miers, E Tromer, M Virza (2014). Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from bitcoin. 2014 IEEE symposium on security and privacy. 459-474.
  5. ^ a b c Ofir Dor (25 March 2021). Blockchain scalability co Starkware raises $75m. Globes.
  6. ^ סע"ש 23228-04-19 : הטכניון - מכון טכנולוגי לישראל ואח' נ' בן ששון ואח'
  7. ^ a b Lital Dobrovitsky (April 22, 2019). Technion Suing Senior Professor for 50% of His Company Stake. Calcalist.
  8. ^ a b c d Amitai Ziv (November 23, 2021). Caring for Your CryptoKitties Has Never Been Easier, Thanks to These Israelis. Haaretz.
  9. ^ (October 29, 2018). Intel Capital, Sequoia Back Blockchain Startup StarkWare in $30 Million Round. Calcalist.
  10. ^ a b Allon Sinai (January 18, 2021). The Bitcoin bull is raging and StarkWare aims to ensure blockchain follows suit. Calcalist.
  11. ^ a b (November 16, 2021). StarkWare joins Israeli unicorn club with $50 million Series C at $2 billion valuation. Calcalist.
  12. ^ Steven Scheer (May 25, 2022). Blockchain tech firm StarkWare raises $100 mln, valued at $8 bln. Reuters.
  13. ^ About us. Starkware site.
  14. ^ a b c Meir Orbach (March 10, 2022). StarkWare set to hit $6 billion valuation in new funding round. Calcalist.
  15. ^ Eli Ben-Sasson, Iddo Bentov, Yinon Horesh, Michael Riabzev (March 6, 2018). Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity
  16. ^ Raisa Bruner (November 18, 2021). Environmental Concerns Have Cast Doubt on NFTs—But That's Changing. Time.
  17. ^ Noga Martin (May 27, 2022). Israeli fintech startup achieves ‘Level 8’ unicorn status. Israel Hayom.
  18. ^ Jeff Kauflin (October 15, 2021). How A 19-Person Cryptocurrency Startup Surpassed Coinbase In Daily Trading Volume. Forbes.
  19. ^ Dean Takahashi (September 14, 2021). Immutable raises $60M for NFT games platform on Ethereum. VentureBeat.
  20. ^ (February 23, 2022). Opera Integrates Ethereum Layer 2, bringing access to DeFi to Millions of Users. PR Newswire.
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