StarkWare
StarkWare company profile covering its platform features, milestones, and team.
starkware.coFounded 2018
About
StarkWare is a blockchain infrastructure business dedicated to improving Ethereum scalability with zero-knowledge proofs, or ZK-STARKs. It develops cryptographic technology to enable faster and cheaper transactions while maintaining decentralization and Ethereum-level security. Its core networks, StarkNet and StarkEx, allow developers to build high-performance dApps, DeFi platforms, NFT projects, and on-chain games that avoid common scaling limitations. The ecosystem is designed for developers, with tools and a modular architecture that make it easy to create and distribute applications. StarkWare's use of advanced proof systems enables the execution of complex computations on-chain without slowing down or raising costs. Key Features of StarkWare: • Cairo-based developer ecosystem with tools that simplify dApp creation and deployment. • Ethereum Layer-2 scaling that reduces gas fees while increasing transaction speed and throughput. • StarkNet, a permissionless and fully decentralized ZK-rollup, allows general-purpose smart contracts with Cairo. • StarkEx is an application-specific scaling engine developed for DeFi, NFTs, trading platforms, and gaming apps. • STARK proofs offer strong security with minimal trust assumptions and are designed to resist future post-quantum risks. StarkWare Milestones: Year Achievements 2018 Company Formation & Seed Funding StarkWare was founded and raised $6M in seed funding to build STARK-based scaling solutions. 2019 Introduction of Cairo Cairo was created as the first Turing-complete programming language built specifically for generating STARK proofs. 2020 StarkEx Mainnet Launch The first permissioned “scalability engine” went live, supporting high-performance dApps like dYdX and Immutable X. 2021 Starknet Alpha Launch The first general-purpose, permissionless ZK-Rollup was launched on Ethereum Mainnet. 2022 Recursive Proving Deployment “Proofs of proofs” were introduced, letting the system combine multiple blocks into a single proof for higher scalability. 2023 The "Quantum Leap" A major upgrade that improved throughput (TPS) and reduced confirmation latency. 2024 STRK Token & TEE Integration The STRK token was launched for decentralized governance, along with Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) for privacy. 2025 Full Decentralized Sequencing The network moved from a centralized operator setup to a decentralized group of sequencers and provers.
Team (3)
Funding
- Series DGreenoaks Capital10,00,00,00025 May 2022
- Series CSequoia Capital5,00,00,00016 Nov 2021
- Series BParadigm7,50,00,00024 Mar 2021
- Series AParadigm3,00,00,00029 Oct 2018
- Seed RoundFred Ehrsam031 Jan 2018
FAQs
- StarkWare provides scalable blockchain infrastructure using zero-knowledge proofs, enabling Ethereum Layer-2 networks such as StarkNet.