On Tuesday, the Israeli company StarkWare announced via Twitter that it has raised $ 50 million in Series C financing, and that the company is now valued at $ 2 billion. Sequoia Capital was the leading investor among other shareholders. Seven months ago, StarkWare raised $ 75 million in Series B financing led by Paradigm.
The news comes ahead of the launch of StarkNet Alpha 2, an update to Zero-Knowledge Rollup, or zk-Rollup, the technology on the Ethereum network, which is currently scheduled to roll out in late November. The company said that StarkNet Alpha plans to support authorized rollouts of smart contracts, and opens up scaling technology to anyone who wants to use it.
StarkWare is one of the other scaling protocols for Ethereum that has recently expanded in scope despite rising gas prices. The StarkEx L2 scalability engine allowed partners such as the dYdX trading platform to propose intra-chain trades using zk-Rollups. This reduces trading fees by reducing the amount of gas. DYdX recently released its control token, DYDX, and its airdrops have exceeded $ 100,000 for the most active users.
There are two main types of joining methods: zk and optimistic joining. While Optimistic Rollups assumes that transactions are valid by default and only triggers a calculation, ZK-Rollups generates zero knowledge evidence to verify transactions and continuously sends this evidence to the Ethereum network. With zk-Rollup, block validation and money transfers are faster and cheaper as less data is required.
Starkware L2 rival Polygon also launched the zk-STARK-based virtual Miden machine to develop decentralized applications, also known as DApps.
