Zero-Knowledge Rollup scaling firm StarkWare revealed on Wednesday that it has raised an additional $100 million, valuing the business at $8 billion.
It’s been six months since the Tel Aviv-based company raised $50 million at a $2 billion value in a Series C investment round. Greenoaks Capital and Coatue led the funding round, while Tiger Global and a number of other investors also participated.
To to co-founder and CEO Uri Kolodny, “This is a vote of confidence in the tech stack we’ve created, which makes blockchain scalable for mass usage and reduces transaction costs borne by consumers. That VCs are “signalling their robust support, even in a bad market,” he added, is a positive indication for the industry.
STARKs, or scalable transparent arguments of knowledge, are a special sort of Zero-Knowledge Rollup used by StarkWare. Transactions may be “rolled up” together and sent back to the Ethereum mainnet for confirmation using STARKs from StarkWare. While maintaining the security and decentralisation of the Ethereum mainnet, STARKs reduce gas prices by several orders of magnitude and provide near-instant transaction finality.
For a tenth of the cost of Ethereum’s mainnet, StarkWare’s StarkEx solution processes moreover 250,000 transactions a day, allowing apps like dYdX, Sorare, and Immutable X to benefit from its security. Work on a more universal scaling solution known as StarkNet has begun. While StarkEx is an application-specific layer 2, StarkNet is a completely interoperable layer 2 where any developer may begin creating and deploying crypto applications..
In recent weeks, StarkWare hasn’t been the only Layer 2 project making news. It was revealed in April that the token for the Optimistic Rollup-based Layer 2 network, OP, will be distributed to early users via an airdrop. In contrast to zkSync, which has announced intentions to decentralise its network via token offers, StarkWare has yet to confirm or refute plans to issue a token for its Ethereum scaling solution.
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