StarkWare Industries, the blockchain tech startup improving the scalability and privacy in blockchains using its in-house developed cryptographic proofs has recently announced raising $100M at a valuation of $8B in its Series D. StarkWare’s funding follows its Series C which took place 6 months ago and valued the company at $2B.
This deal which was closed in the thick of a crypto bear market was facilitated by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue also included Tiger Global as well as other new and existing investors. This investment highlights the overflowing investor confidence in Starkware’s tech, which serves as a critical infrastructure supporting the move to Web3.’ The round also involved a secondary transaction as part of the round in which employees company-wide sold their stocks.
Starkware’s blockchain Layer 2 solution
The Israeli blockchain startup has deployed STARKs, a class of mathematical systems developed by StarkWare’s co-founder and President Eli Ben-Sasson alongside his team of computer scientists. The solution has its goal to enable far more efficient use of blockchain technology.
STARKs cut fees by reducing the amount of information written to the blockchain. It also speeds up transactions by easing often heavy blockchain congestion and provides a way for blockchains to scale without any dilution to its originality, with the math ensuring it runs with absolute integrity.
Handling more transactions than bitcoin
StarkWare’s first platform, StarkEx, has been in use for two years and handles more transactions than Bitcoin presently. It compresses them using STARKs and then adds them to the Ethereum blockchain. NFT businesses and financial institutions use StarkEx to overcome the problem of crippling congestion on blockchains which causes delays and high transaction fees. The result has been cheaper and faster blockchain use.
Apps have used StarkEx to facilitate transactions of over half a trillion dollars ($500B). With the NFT market springing to life in 2021, StarkEx became hugely popular for facilitating minting and trading NFTs. Minting via StarkEx was 20,000 times cheaper than transacting directly on Ethereum in some instances. The public benefits from StarkWare’s NFT services have been experienced firsthand via the fantasy soccer game Sorare and the carbon-neutral platform Immutable X.
StarkEx has helped scale some of the biggest crypto success stories, such as the finance platform dYdX. Numerous other blockchain projects are also in line to onboard onto StarkEx in the coming months. Its list includes long-established companies that are looking to move into Web3 & crypto.
Supporting tomorrow’s blockchain economy
In an effort to support the race for Web3, StarkWare created the StarkNet Alpha platform, which is constantly evolving and supports the development of DApps. Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-founder and President at StarkWare, explained this stating, “We’re delivering this to clients via StarkEx, which is saving them millions of dollars in transaction fees weekly and opening up new possibilities for them. But we want everyone to be able to use our tech, so we are building and constantly improving StarkNet in the hope it will empower any developer to build ultra-efficient blockchain apps.”
The startup, founded by Alessandro Chiesa, Eli Ben-Sasson, Michael Riabzev, Uri Kolodny will continue to offer a blockchain scaling cloud service via StarkEx. It plans to decentralise StarkNet soon, meaning it will, like the internet and Ethereum, be controlled by everyone and no-one.
“Unlocking the full potential of Web3 will require achieving the high throughput and low fees that users demand. We think Starkware is the best L2 scaling solution in the world, with profound underlying technology, a burgeoning developer community, and a team that has earned real credibility through years of research and innovation. StarkWare already underpins the largest apps in Web3, and we are delighted to partner with their team as they continue to power many more.” remarked Greanoaks Capital Managing Partner Neil Mehta.
