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StarkWare Industries

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StarkWare Industries
Company typePrivate company
Industryblockchain
Founded2018; 6 years ago (2018)
Founders
Headquarters
Netanya
,
Israel
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Eli Ben-Sasson (CEO & President)
Uri Kolodny (former CEO)
Oren Katz (COO)
Avihu Levy (CPO)
ProductsStarkEx, Cairo, Starknet
Number of employees
190
Websitestarkware.co

StarkWare Industries is an Israeli software company that specializes in cryptography. It develops zero-knowledge proof technology that compresses information 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

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StarkWare Industries was founded in 2018 by Eli Ben-Sasson (CEO & President) from the Technion, one of the founders of Zcash,[3][4] his former phd. student Michael Riabzev, Uri Kolodny (former CEO), and Alessandro Chiesa from UC Berkeley (chief scientist).[5] In April 2019 Technion sued Ben-Sasson and Riabazev for violating its Intellectual property.[6] The institute claimed that Ben-Sasson established StarkWare clandestinely, for 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 afterward $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 VCs 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 a 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 was 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 190 people[14] and is located in Netanya.[10][15]

Technology

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Starkware develops technology called STARK, a type of non-interactive zero-knowledge proof, 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.[8][16] 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 a 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 for each transaction.[17] The energy consumption per transaction reduces by 200,000 times.[18]

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,[19] Immutable X,[20] the web browser Opera,[21] 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

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References

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  1. ^ Mohammed, Kiran Mathur (29 July 2021). "Eli Ben-Sasson develops technology to make blockchain 20,000 times cheaper". Trinidad and Tobago Newsday. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  2. ^ a b c d e Bambysheva, Nina (25 May 2022). "Ethereum Scaling Company StarkWare Quadruples Valuation To $8 Billion Amid Bear Market". Forbes. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  3. ^ "Founding Zcash scientists". Zcash. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  4. ^ Sasson, EB; Chiesa, A; Garman, C; Green, M; Miers, I; Tromer, E; Virza, M (2014). Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from bitcoin. 2014 IEEE symposium on security and privacy. pp. 459–474.
  5. ^ a b c Dor, Ofir (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' תולעת המשפט". {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  7. ^ a b Dobrovitsky, Lital (22 April 2019). "Technion Suing Senior Professor for 50% of His Company Stake". CTECH - www.calcalistech.com. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  8. ^ a b c d Amitai Ziv. "Caring for Your CryptoKitties Has Never Been Easier, Thanks to These Israelis". Haaretz. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  9. ^ "Intel Capital, Sequoia Back Blockchain Startup StarkWare in $30 Million Round". CTECH - www.calcalistech.com. 29 October 2018. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  10. ^ a b Sinai, Allon (18 January 2021). "The Bitcoin bull is raging and StarkWare aims to ensure blockchain follows suit". CTECH - www.calcalistech.com. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  11. ^ a b "StarkWare joins Israeli unicorn club with $50 million Series C at $2 billion valuation". CTECH - www.calcalistech.com. 16 November 2021. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  12. ^ Scheer, Steven (25 May 2022). "Blockchain tech firm StarkWare raises $100 mln, valued at $8 bln". Reuters.
  13. ^ "About Us". Starkware. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  14. ^ a b c Meir Orbach (10 March 2022). "StarkWare set to hit $6 billion valuation in new funding round". ctech. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  15. ^ Peter, Alex. "Blockchain development services". Retrieved 26 January 2022.
  16. ^ Ben-Sasson, Eli; Bentov, Iddo; Horesh, Yinon; Riabzev, Michael (2019). Scalable Zero Knowledge with No Trusted Setup. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 11694. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 701–732. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-26954-8_23. ISBN 978-3-030-26953-1. S2CID 199501907. Retrieved 7 January 2023. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  17. ^ Raisa Bruner (18 November 2021). "Are Environmentally-Friendly NFTs Possible?". Time. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  18. ^ Noga Martin (27 May 2022). "Israeli Fintech Startup Achieves Level 8 Unicorn Status". israelhayom.com. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  19. ^ Kauflin, Jeff (15 October 2021). "How A 19-Person Cryptocurrency Startup Surpassed Coinbase In Daily Trading Volume". Forbes. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  20. ^ Takahashi, Dean (14 September 2021). "Immutable raises $60M for NFT games platform on Ethereum". VentureBeat. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  21. ^ "Opera Integrates Ethereum Layer 2, bringing access to DeFi to Millions of Users" (Press release). PR Newswire. 23 February 2022. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
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