Starkware

mission

To bring scalability and privacy to a blockchain near you.

current challenges

Looking at the blockchain, we see something that is of tremendous use and potential but is so limited in scale. It needs to scale dramatically and exponentially and it needs to do so under the same principles of decentralization and openness. 

The first set of challenges has to do with service availability: how do we ensure sufficient uptime? How do we ensure that the service in its entirety is sufficiently decentralized? Here there are several directions to explore, including open-sourcing, licensing, and having the smart-contract charge a fee.

history

StarkWare was founded in January 2018 by Eli Ben-Sasson (co-inventor of STARK, previously prof. of CS at Technion, founding scientist of Zcash), Uri Kolodny (serial entrepreneur), Michael Riabzev (co-inventor of STARK), and Alessandro Chiesa (founding scientist of Zcash and prof. of CS at UC Berkeley). 

StarkWare has secured investments from several VCs in the crypto space across three equity rounds (totaling $111 million). It has also received a $12 million grant from the Ethereum Foundation to help scale the Ethereum network. Investors include Vitalik Buterin, Paradigm, Pantera, Sequoia, Founders Fund, DCVC, Wing, Floodgate, Intel Capital, Atomico, ConsenSys, Multicoin, Polychain, Naval Ravikant, and others.

In June 2020, StarkWare’s scaling solution, StarkEx, launched on Ethereum’s mainnet. As of March 2021, StarkWare has not launched a token and has 40+ employees.

core team

Eli Ben-Sasson - Co-Founder & President

Uri Kolodny - Co-Founder & CEO

Michael Riabzev - Co-Founder

Alessandro Chiesa - Co-Founder & Chief Scientist 

Ariel Elperin - Product Manager & Blockchain Researcher

benefits

Together, we are not only rising to the challenges, we are redefining the paradigm. If you are curious and tenacious, we'd like to hear from you.