Israel-based StarkWare announced on Tuesday by way of 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.
A giant 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 top of November. The corporate stated that StarkNet Alpha plans to help 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 lately surged in adoption regardless of the climb in fuel costs. Its StarkEx L2 scalability engine has allowed companions, equivalent to buying and selling platform dYdX, to submit on-chain trades in zk-Rollups. This minimizes buying and selling charges by lowering the quantity of fuel. The dYdX trade lately launched a governance token, DYDX, and its airdrop surpassed $100,000 for essentially the most energetic customers.
There are two principal sorts 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 knowledge is included.
Starkware’s L2 competitor Polygon concurrently launched its zk-STARK powered Miden Virtual Machine for the event of decentralized functions, also referred to as DApps.
