StarkWare is an Israeli company that pioneered the use of STARK proofs — a type of zero-knowledge cryptography — for scaling Ethereum. Founded in 2018 by Eli Ben-Sasson, Uri Kolodny, Michael Riabzev, and Alessandro Chiesa, the company has raised over $250 million from investors including Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, and the Ethereum Foundation.
The company’s core technology is STARKs (Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge), which allow one party to prove a computation was performed correctly without revealing the underlying data. Unlike SNARKs (used by competitors), STARKs don’t require a trusted setup ceremony, making them theoretically more secure and transparent.
StarkWare operates two main products. StarkEx is a permissioned scaling engine used by dYdX (before its migration to Cosmos), Immutable X, Sorare, and other applications. It has processed over $1 trillion in cumulative trading volume. StarkNet (now called Starknet) is a permissionless layer-2 rollup on Ethereum where anyone can deploy smart contracts written in Cairo, StarkWare’s custom programming language.
The company reached a $8 billion valuation during its 2022 funding round, making it one of the most valuable blockchain infrastructure companies globally. Eli Ben-Sasson, the co-founder and president, is a renowned cryptographer whose academic work on STARKs predates the company by years. StarkWare’s Netanya office houses a team that’s unusually heavy on PhD-level researchers compared to most blockchain startups.
