StarkWare, an Ethereum (ETH) scaling solution, has successfully completed a $100 million Series D funding round. This brings the project’s valuation to $8 billion, four times what it was previously.
StarkWare quadruples its valuation
StarkWare, a solution working to improve the scalability of Ethereum (ETH), has completed a $100 million Series D funding round. As a result, its valuation has quadrupled and is now estimated at $8 billion.
The round was led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue Management, two investment managers. Other well-known participants include Tiger Capital, as well as StarkWare’s regular investors.
We are thrilled to announce our $100M Series D at an $8B valuation.
We would like to thank Greenoaks and Coatue – our lead investors, Tiger Global, and many of our existing investors, for their vote of confidence in the technology, products, and ecosystem that we’re building. pic.twitter.com/0R1e1h31HK
– StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) May 25, 2022
This initiative comes at a time of bear market, exacerbated by the macro-economic context and the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and its “stablecoin” UST. Despite this, Uri Kolodny, co-founder and CEO of StarkWare, said the fundraising was “a vote of confidence” in his company’s technology.
StarkWare’s valuation has risen dramatically in recent months. Last November, the company raised $50 million in a Series C financing round, bringing its valuation to $2 billion.
When asked by The Block about the reasons for the significant increase in valuation, StarkWare co-founder and CEO Uri Kolodny said:
“[StarkWare] is the most complete, powerful, robust, future-proof solution for scaling blockchain and that triggers considerable interest in being part of StarkWare. “
StarkWare and the scalability of Ethereum
While Ethereum is regularly singled out for its exorbitant fees, and the migration to the Beacon Chain keeps getting pushed back, StarkWare has established itself as an important second layer protocol. This fundraising is a testament to the growing institutional interest in these Ethereum network scaling solutions.
Founded in 2017, StarkWare mainly offers two products: StarkEx and StarkNet. The former is defined as an engine dedicated to improving the scalability of Ethereum and the latter is a second-layer network for Ethereum, based on the ZK-Rollup technology, of which the Alpha 2 version was recently released.
In a few words, the ZK-Rollup technology inherits the properties of Rollups, but also of Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP). In a few words, ZKP makes it possible to prove that a piece of information is true without having to reveal the information relating to it. Thus, the hand is returned to the individuals on the data they share about their identity.
According to StarkWare’s other co-founder and president, Eli Ben-Sasson, the goal is to make blockchain applications as common and accessible as smartphone apps:
“Anybody who wants to use blockchain can do so.
Anyone who has ever built a website can use StarkNet to build a blockchain application that will be part of the Web3 revolution, opening the door to new and exciting uses of blockchain. “
Several blockchain projects have started using StarkWare’s technology, including the decentralised trading platform dYdX, the blockchain game Sorare and also Immutable. This protocol has been using StarkEx for several months to mint NFTs on Ethereum, reducing the associated gas costs for its blockchain game Gods Unchained.
