StarkWare Industries
 | |
| Company type | Private company |
|---|---|
| Industry | blockchain |
| Founded | 2018 |
| Founders |
|
| Headquarters | , Israel |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Eli Ben-Sasson (CEO & President) Uri Kolodny (former CEO) Oren Katz (COO) Avihu Levy (CPO) |
| Products | StarkEx, Cairo, Starknet |
Number of employees | 190 |
| Website | starkware |
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
[edit]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
[edit]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
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "Founding Zcash scientists". Zcash. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ 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.
- ^ a b c Dor, Ofir (25 March 2021). "Blockchain scalability co Starkware raises $75m". Globes.
- ^ "סע"ש 23228-04-19: הטכניון - מכון טכנולוגי לישראל ואח' נ' בן ששון ואח' תולעת המשפט".
{{cite web}}: Check|url=value (help) - ^ 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.
- ^ a b c d Amitai Ziv. "Caring for Your CryptoKitties Has Never Been Easier, Thanks to These Israelis". Haaretz. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ "Intel Capital, Sequoia Back Blockchain Startup StarkWare in $30 Million Round". CTECH - www.calcalistech.com. 29 October 2018. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Scheer, Steven (25 May 2022). "Blockchain tech firm StarkWare raises $100 mln, valued at $8 bln". Reuters.
- ^ "About Us". Starkware. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ a b c Meir Orbach (10 March 2022). "StarkWare set to hit $6 billion valuation in new funding round". ctech. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ Peter, Alex. "Blockchain development services". Retrieved 26 January 2022.
- ^ 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) - ^ Raisa Bruner (18 November 2021). "Are Environmentally-Friendly NFTs Possible?". Time. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ Noga Martin (27 May 2022). "Israeli Fintech Startup Achieves Level 8 Unicorn Status". israelhayom.com. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ Kauflin, Jeff (15 October 2021). "How A 19-Person Cryptocurrency Startup Surpassed Coinbase In Daily Trading Volume". Forbes. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ Takahashi, Dean (14 September 2021). "Immutable raises $60M for NFT games platform on Ethereum". VentureBeat. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ "Opera Integrates Ethereum Layer 2, bringing access to DeFi to Millions of Users" (Press release). PR Newswire. 23 February 2022. Retrieved 7 January 2023.