Huge fundraisings are happening at a rapid pace for crypto projects, and what’s more, with the blessing of big names in finance and investment. This time, it’s StarkWare’s technology for Ethereum’s second-layer solutions that is getting help from venture capital giant Sequoia Capital to fund its development.
A $2 billion capitalization for StarkWare
Hardly a day goes by without news of a massive new investment in a cryptocurrency project. Far from the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) craze of 2017-2018, which mostly concerned individuals (with the drifts we know), it is now big venture capital firms (VCs) that no longer hesitate to finance the growth of crypto-companies.
In a press release published on November 16, the StarkWare teams proudly announced that their crypto project had successfully raised a total of $50 million.
This Series C investment round was led by the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. This institution of fundraising has, in their time, participated in the financing rounds of Cisco, Apple, Youtube or Facebook… Moreover, other well-known names of crypto projects financing have also participated, such as Paradigm, Three Arrows Capital, Alameda Research (behind the FTX platform) and Founders Fund.
This funding round comes just seven months after a Series B round, which had already managed to bring in $75 million to the project. With the latest funding, the 2018-founded company is now valued at an impressive $2 billion.
“This valuation makes us more confident than ever in our vision. By empowering blockchains to scale globally, people of all economic status will be able to gradually stop entrusting their data to the hands of large corporations, and control it themselves instead.”
Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder and president of StarkWare
StarkWare wants to multiply the capabilities of blockchain networks
Israel-based StarkWare has developed a technology, aimed at Ethereum’s (ETH) second-layer solutions, that uses ZK-rolls technology to drastically increase the number of transactions per second possible on the network.
“Today, blockchains simply can’t handle the volume of transactions needed for massive use (…) The math-based technology invented by StarkWare is the invisible hand that increases the bandwidth of the blockchain, giving it the ability to serve everyone.”
Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder and president of StarkWare
StarkWare’s work is already being used by blockchain projects such as dYdX, Sorare and Immutable X. Because this more efficient use of blockchain networks not only reduces transaction costs, but also their carbon footprint, so decried by environmentalists: more transactions for similar costs.
This Series C funding will support the deployment of the “StarkNet” platform, a second layer solution of StarkWare’s own. It will allow anyone to create decentralized applications (DApps) using the ZK-rolls technology developed by StarkWare.
For all blockchain networks, the issue of scalability (the scalability of the number of transactions/second) is a key issue for any global adoption. Even the king of cryptos, Bitcoin, cannot escape this, and needs this evolution, which will undoubtedly pass through its Lightning Network.
