Israel-based StarkWare announced on Tuesday through Twitter that it had raised $50 million in a Sequence C funding spherical, and that the agency’s valuation is now at $2 billion. Sequoia Capital was the lead investor, amongst different contributors. Seven months in the past, StarkWare raised $75 million in a Series B funding led by Paradigm.
We’re excited to announce our Sequence C of $50M at $2B.
An enormous due to our lead investor, @sequoia, our great follow-on buyers, and the handfuls of ecosystem companions and collaborators who participated on this spherical, for his or her vote of confidence in our merchandise and tech. pic.twitter.com/CuaeMSf2s6
— StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) November 16, 2021
This information comes forward of the launch of StarkNet Alpha 2, an improve to its Zero-Data Rollup expertise, or zk-Rollup, on Ethereum mainnet, which is presently scheduled for deployment by the tip of November. The corporate mentioned that StarkNet Alpha plans to assist permissioned sensible contract deployment, opening up the scaling expertise to whoever desires to construct on it.
StarkWare is among the many few layer-two scaling protocols for Ethereum which have just lately surged in adoption regardless of the climb in gasoline costs. Its StarkEx L2 scalability engine has allowed companions, akin to buying and selling platform dYdX, to submit on-chain trades in zk-Rollups. This minimizes buying and selling charges by decreasing the quantity of gasoline. The dYdX alternate just lately launched a governance token, DYDX, and its airdrop surpassed $100,000 for essentially the most energetic customers.
There are two essential kinds of rollup expertise: zk and Optimistic Rollups. Whereas Optimistic Rollups assume transactions are legitimate by default and solely run the computation, ZK-Rollups generate zero-knowledge proofs for validating transactions and submit these proofs to the Ethereum mainnet repeatedly. With a zk-Rollup, validating a block and transferring funds is faster and cheaper as a result of much less information is included.
Starkware’s L2 competitor Polygon concurrently launched its zk-STARK powered Miden Virtual Machine for the event of decentralized purposes, also referred to as DApps.
