StarkWare

StarkWare was founded in 2018 by Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Michael Riabzev and Uri Kolodny and is headquartered in Netanya, Israel. Among the founders, Eli Ben-Sasson was previously a professor of computer science at the Technion and is also a co-inventor of the FRI and Zerocash protocols; Riabzev developed and implemented the zk-STARK system during his doctorate at the same institution; Chiesa is a co-inventor of Zerocash and a computer science faculty member at UC Berkeley; and Kolodny, a serial entrepreneur, became the company’s first CEO, with Eli Ben-Sasson as president and chairman of the board.⁠[1][2][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

In October–November 2018, StarkWare closed a Series A led by Paradigm, with participation from Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, Atomico, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital and others, and follow-on investment from earlier backers Pantera, Floodgate and Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry; Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang joined the board. Accounts of the amount differ: one puts it at $30 million, another at $36 million.⁠[3][3][3][3][4]

In June 2020, StarkWare’s scaling engine StarkEx went into production on Ethereum mainnet. StarkEx is a permissioned, application-specific scaling solution: an operator (such as an exchange) sends user transactions to the StarkEx service, which batches them and generates a STARK proof, and an on-chain verifier contract confirms the whole batch with little computation; a single proof can cover 12,000 to 500,000 transactions. Applications using StarkEx include the derivatives platform dYdX, the NFT platforms Immutable and Sorare, the spot trading platform DeversiFi, and Celer. As of October 2026, StarkEx had processed $1 trillion in cumulative volume and settled more than 400 million transactions.⁠[5][6][5][6][6][5]

In January 2021, StarkWare published its Starknet roadmap, aiming for a layer-2 network supporting arbitrary smart contracts, composability and decentralized operation. In March, the company closed a $75 million Series B led by Paradigm. In June, Starknet Planets Alpha went live on testnet, allowing any developer to deploy contracts without permission, with state transitions proven off-chain and verified on-chain. In November 2021, Starknet Alpha launched on Ethereum mainnet, initially with permissioned contract deployment.⁠[7][7][4][7][7][8][9]

In November 2021, StarkWare closed a $50 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $2 billion valuation, joining the ranks of unicorns, with participation from Founders Fund, Paradigm, Three Arrows and Alameda Research. Eli Ben-Sasson said at the time that StarkWare handled the most transactions and volume of any layer-2 solution, having settled over $200 billion and more than 50 million transactions.⁠[10][10][4][10]

On May 25, 2022, StarkWare announced a $100 million Series D led by Greenoaks CapitalGreenoaksGreenoaks is an American investment firm co-founded by Neil Mehta in 2012 and known for concentrated, long-term investing; it made an early, large bet on the Korean e-commerce company Coupang and has invested in companies including Wiz, Stripe, Databricks, and Anthropic. In May 2026, it co-led Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H funding round with Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, and Sequoia Capital.Open the full entry and Coatue with participation from Tiger Global, at an $8 billion valuation, quadrupling its value in six months; although the crypto market had fallen sharply, the round closed as planned. CEO Kolodny said the company had sales in the tens of millions and was profitable, and that its platform had computed 150 million transactions for Ethereum; the company then had about 80 employees, mostly in its Netanya office, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was among its shareholders.⁠[2][2][2][4][4][4][4]

On July 13, 2022, StarkWare published a decentralization proposal for Starknet: a nonprofit foundation with the mission of maintaining Starknet as a public good, and a native token for governance, fee payment and staking, so that the network could keep operating even if StarkWare ceased to exist. StarkWare had minted 10 billion tokens off-chain, initially allocated as follows: 17% to StarkWare investors, 32.9% to core contributors (StarkWare and its employees, consultants and partner developers), and the remaining 50.1% granted by StarkWare to the foundation, comprising 9% community provisions, 9% community rebates, 12% development and research grants, 10% strategic reserve, 2% donations and 8.1% unallocated. The proposal stressed that the tokens do not represent equity in StarkWare or confer any rights against it.⁠[8][8][8][11][11][11][11][11][11][11][11]

In September 2022, StarkWare published its Regenesis plan, under which Starknet would run only Cairo 1.0-based contracts after Cairo 1.0’s release while preserving existing state and avoiding application downtime. On November 9, the Starknet Foundation, independent of StarkWare, was formally established, holding 50.1% of the initial token supply and governed by a seven-member board that included Eli Ben-Sasson and Kolodny. On November 16, the STRK token was deployed on Ethereum mainnet but not offered for sale; tokens held by shareholders, employees and independent partner developers were locked for four years with gradual release beginning after one year, and could be used for voting and staking while locked. In December, the first phase of Starknet governance began, with token holders and delegates approving protocol upgrades through off-chain Snapshot votes; Cairo 1.0 had already been open-sourced.⁠[12][12][13][13][13][13][14][14][14][14][15][15]

In June 2023, the Starknet Foundation appointed Diego Oliva, formerly Facebook’s regional director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as its first CEO. In August, StarkWare open-sourced its STARK prover under the Apache 2.0 license, naming it Stone, and released the code at the Starknet Summit on August 31; that year it also open-sourced the Starknet sequencer and the Papyrus full node. StarkWare said that in 2023 StarkEx passed $1 trillion in cumulative trading volume and that Starknet, during several weeks, scaled more activity on Ethereum than all other layer-2 networks combined.⁠[16][16][17][17][18][18]

In January 2024, Starknet v0.13.0 allowed users to pay fees in STRK. On February 7, StarkWare proposed a STRK minting mechanism under which more staking means higher total minting but lower staking yield, with annual inflation capped at 4%. On February 14, the Starknet Foundation announced the first round of its Provisions airdrop, distributing more than 700 million STRK to nearly 1.3 million addresses, including Starknet users and developers, StarkEx users, Ethereum stakers and protocol contributors, and developers of selected non-crypto open-source projects; early Starknet users had to meet conditions on transaction count, months active and volume and hold at least 0.005 ETH in their account on November 15, 2023. Residents of sanctioned regions and US persons were ineligible.⁠[19][20][20][20][21][21][21][22]

On February 20, STRK claiming opened, with 728 million tokens (7.3% of total supply) unlocked to more than 1.3 million wallets, and exchanges including Binance, Bybit, Bitfinex and OKXOKXOKX is a global digital-asset trading platform that began operating in 2017 under the name OKEx. Different regional entities provide trading, wallet, payment and related services; the global platform, OKCoin and locally licensed entities must be distinguished.Open the full entry listed it the same day; trading opened at $5–7 and then fell to around $2. Users encountered errors and network congestion while claiming, and some in the community criticized the tokenomics as “contrived” and called it fraudulent. That month the Starknet Foundation also launched DeFi Spring, distributing 40 million STRK to participating DeFi protocols over six to eight months.⁠[23][23][23][23][23][24]

StarkWare had planned to unlock 1.3 billion STRK (about 13% of total supply) for investors and early contributors at once on April 15, 2024, and fears that such a large unlock would hit the price drew criticism; STRK fell as much as 55% from its first-day high of $4.41. Eli Ben-Sasson initially responded that the unlock arrangement for the team and early investors “may be non-standard” but that “we build different.”⁠[25][25][25][25][25]

On February 22, StarkWare announced it was revising the schedule after listening to ecosystem partners: 64 million tokens would unlock monthly from April 15, 2024, through March 15, 2025, then 127 million monthly for the following 24 months, finishing on March 15, 2027; 580 million would be released by the end of 2024 instead of the roughly 2 billion originally planned. Eli Ben-Sasson posted that the company had listened to concerns about the long-term alignment of StarkWare with the Starknet ecosystem, believed trust is earned with actions and thanked investors for their support. STRK rose after the announcement.⁠[25][25][26][26][19][25][25][25][25]

In February 2024, StarkWare announced it was developing Stwo, a next-generation prover implementing the Circle STARK protocol from joint research with Polygon Labs, which unlocks the efficient M31 prime field, and open-sourced from day one under Apache 2.0. That year, Kolodny stepped down as CEO for personal reasons and was succeeded by Eli Ben-Sasson. In August, Diego Oliva stepped down as CEO of the Starknet Foundation, and James Strudwick became its executive director.⁠[27][27][27][28][28][29][29]

On November 26, 2024, the first phase of Starknet staking went live on mainnet: validators must stake at least 20,000 STRK, delegators have no minimum, unstaking requires a 21-day wait, and a community vote capped inflation at 1.6%; by February 2025, more than 170 million STRK was staked by 63,000 delegators and 106 validators. On June 17, 2025, Staking v2 went live; StarkWare launched a delegation program to spread stake, capping its own validator at 10% of the staking pool.⁠[30][30][30][30][31][31][32][32][32]

On March 11, 2025, Starknet announced plans to settle on Bitcoin, aiming to become a decentralized layer 2 that scales and settles both Bitcoin and Ethereum. StarkWare then described itself as following the “Bitcoin Standard,” saying it held a significant strategic Bitcoin reserve and had increased it by 40% over several months.⁠[33][33][33]

In September 2025, Starknet released v0.14.0 (Grinta), moving from a single sequencer to three sequencers running consensus and taking turns producing blocks, though the operation and control of the sequencers remained centralized under StarkWare. Shortly after the upgrade on September 2, Starknet suffered an outage, intermittently unavailable between 02:20 and 13:40 UTC that day, and two chain reorganizations were needed to restore operation, reverting roughly one hour and roughly 20 minutes of transactions respectively; the incident report attributed the cause to Ethereum node failures that left sequencers seeing different states, skipped validations during manual intervention, and a Blockifier bug in v0.14.0. In November, StarkWare’s new open-source prover S-two went live on Starknet mainnet, replacing Stone.⁠[34][34][35][35][35][35][35][35][36]

In 2026, StarkWare focused its research on the threat of quantum computing to blockchains: in February, quantum computing expert Scott Aaronson joined its scientific advisory board, and that month BIP 360, a quantum-resistant soft fork proposal co-authored by its head of Bitcoin growth, Isabel Foxen Duke, was merged into the Bitcoin BIP repository. In April, StarkWare laid off dozens of employees, announcing a shift from infrastructure and research to revenue-generating products and a reorganization into smaller, more flexible teams, leaving about 170 employees and setting up a new business unit for Chief Product Officer Avihu Levy; estimates suggested that revenue from its blockchain network, its primary income source, had declined.⁠[37][38][28][28][28][28][28][28]

On August 26, the quantum-safe Bitcoin (QSB) method designed by Avihu Levy and published in April 2026 produced its first Bitcoin mainnet transaction, without changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules. On September 10, the ECDSA.fail paper, co-authored by seven people from StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation, was published; the open challenge cut Google’s March estimate of the cost of a quantum attack on elliptic-curve cryptography by more than 50%.⁠[39][39][39][40]

On October 9, 2026, CEO Eli Ben-Sasson spoke as StarkWare’s representative at the Zcash Zummit session of Network State Conference 2026 in Singapore.⁠[41]

StarkWare’s technology is built on the STARK (Scalable, Transparent ARgument of Knowledge) proof system: large computations are performed off-chain and a proof of correctness is generated, then verified on-chain in very few steps, lowering the cost per transaction. It has developed Cairo, a language for STARK-provable programs and Starknet’s smart contract language, STARK provers and the SHARP shared proving service. The company calls its vision the “Integrity Web,” in which mathematics and cryptography make companies’ and governments’ fulfillment of their online promises publicly verifiable.⁠[6][6][42][43][44][44]

As of October 2026, StarkWare’s management included co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, Starknet General Manager Tom Brand, Applications General Manager Avihu Levy, Chief Architect Gideon Kaempfer, CFO Ran Grinshtein and CTO Lior Goldberg; its board included co-founder Uri Kolodny, independent director Harish Devarajan and Matt Huang; its scientific advisors included Shafi Goldwasser, Avi Wigderson and Scott Aaronson, among others, and its advisors included Balaji Srinivasan, Joseph Lubin and Naval Ravikant, among others. The company says it has raised $250 million in equity plus a $12 million grant from the Ethereum Foundation.⁠[42][42][42][42][42][1]

StarkWare: Official website: https://starkware.co/ (opens in a new window).⁠[45]

Starknet: Official website: https://www.starknet.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[43][45]

X: Public account: https://x.com/StarkWareLtd (opens in a new window)⁠[43][45]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/starkware/ (opens in a new window)⁠[43]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnDWguR8mE2oDBsjhQkgbvg (opens in a new window)⁠[43]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/starkware-libs (opens in a new window)⁠[43]