StarkWare: Scaling Ethereum through Permissionless, Decentralized Zero-Knowledge Rollups
We at Sequoia are thrilled to lead the Series C in StarkWare, deepening our preexisting relationship that began in 2018 at the Series A and continued earlier this year with the Series B.
Ethereum has been at the heart of a lot of the innovation in crypto over the past few years — DeFi, NFTs, Web3 and more. But while those use cases offer a glimpse of what’s to come, their mass-market success has been limited by the price and throughput of the Ethereum network. With ~15 transactions per second, tens of dollars in gas fees, and minutes (or hours) to achieve finality, it is difficult to support the global population.
While sharding and proof-of-stake will take Ethereum to thousands of transactions per second (or more), we will need millions per second — or even more — for Ethereum and similar networks to reach their full potential as a global, decentralized computer.
Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups offer the most tantalizing solutions for scaling blockchains. Today, every single Ethereum node runs every smart contract in its entirety. With ZK rollups, a single node can execute a smart contract and produce a proof that it did so correctly. Other nodes can very quickly trust the transaction by verifying the proof.
StarkWare has been the market leader in ZK rollups since very early on. The founding team includes multiple world-class cryptographers; Eli Ben-Sasson and Alessandro Chiesa are also founding scientists of Zcash, and Michael Riabzev is a co-inventor of STARKs along with Eli. The team also boasts some of the best researchers in the zero-knowledge community.
They have already been iterating at a breakneck pace. Last year, they released StarkEx to help individual applications scale using STARK-based proofs. Those applications are now flourishing — including dYdX, which processed more than $100B in trading volume last month alone. Sorare — the most popular fantasy sports game on the blockchain — has seen the cost of gas drop by more than 200x. Over $200 billion and over 50 million transactions have been settled via StarkWare to date, including over 21 million NFTs that have been minted.
That innovation is accelerating. Cairo, StarkWare’s language for writing scalable blockchain applications, is seeing increased adoption, and third-party Solidity → Cairo transpilers (e.g., Warp) are making it easy for Ethereum developers to get started or to port over their work. Validium and Volition are innovating on what data needs to reside on-chain (useful for both privacy and scalability reasons).
And the most important release is on the near-term horizon: StarkNet. A fully permissionless, decentralized scaling solution for Ethereum, StarkNet will enable any developer to build applications that are orders-of-magnitude more scalable than L1-based apps.
We are grateful to be partnered with Uri Kolodny, Eli Ben-Sasson, Michael Riabzev, Alessandro Chiesa and the entire team.
To learn more and start building, check out https://starkware.co/. If you’re interested in joining the team, go to https://starkware.co/careers/.
