StarkWare is an Israeli cybersecurity startup which specializes in the development of solutions for enlarging blockchain capacity. The company just completed a $75 million financing round led by Paradigm and with the participation of existing investors Sequoia and Funders Fund, DCVC, Pantera and Wing and new investors Three Arrows and Alameda Research. The company has now raised $111 to date.
Founded in 2018 by President Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO Uri Kolodny, chief architect Michael Riabzev and chief scientist Alessandro Chiesa., StarkWare says that it solves the inherent problems of blockchains – scalability and privacy. The company develops a full proof stack, using STARK technology to generate and verify proofs of computational integrity. StarkWare boasts that its cryptographic proofs are zero-knowledge, succinct, transparent and post-quantum secure.
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StarkWare says that it allows blockchains to massively scale by relying on cryptographic proofs produced by an off-chain prover running in the cloud, and then verified by an on-chain smart-contract. ZK-STARK proofs reveal no information regarding private inputs, and have no trusted setup. Combined with other cryptographic tools, ZK-STARK can be used to completely and provably protect user data.
Cybersecurity is more important than ever. Hackers are not only motivated by money or politics. They often just like being malicious. So even small companies need to be on their guard and be sure to properly protect their systems. In recent months two different Israeli companies were ransomware attacks by the Black Shadow hackers.
Now that cryptos are so popular people need to be concerned with how to secure it. One of the biggest criticisms of cryptos like Bitcoin is that people cannot not be sure that their money is really safe since it is not stored in a real bank. So this is where firms like StarkWare come in.
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Computational Integrity means updating your system’s State as the Laws of Nature update the Universe’s.
More on this topic today March 25 @ 9AM PST https://t.co/raYkb22ZYT
— Eli Ben-Sasson (@EliBenSasson) March 25, 2021
And it’s not alone among Startup Nation cybersecurity startups. Israel’s Curv, which offers a cloud based platform for securely managing cryptocurrencies, was just bought out by PayPal for more than $200 million. Israeli startup Aqua Security and Axonius, an Israeli cybersecurity startup, both recently hit unicorn status valuations above $1 billion.
Ceo Uri Kolodny said, “Our technology can multiply blockchain scalability by 1,000 times. Thanks to our technology we are becoming the engine behind many of the transactions taking place on blockchains and the main engine behind NFTs. It usually takes a long time to go from basic research to a product that is sold on the market. We did that in three years and that is a testament to the quality of our team.”
“StarkWare is emblematic of companies with which Paradigm seeks to partner: a world class team tackling an extremely important problem with stunning growth,” commented Paradigm’s Matt Huang. “We are excited to double down and help them scale DeFi, NFTs and Ethereum more broadly.”
