StarkWare Hits $8B Valuation as Ethereum Layer 2 Race Heats Up
StarkWare Lands Another $100M in Funding
The Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem is attracting a lot of money.
StarkWare, one of only a few businesses focusing on scaling Ethereum via Zero-Knowledge Rollups, said on Wednesday that it has raised another $100 million, increasing its valuation to $8 billion.
The Series D investment round comes six months after the Tel Aviv-based company raised $50 million in a Series C round at a valuation of $2 billion. The fund was led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue, with Tiger Global, a crypto investing behemoth, and a slew of additional investors joining in.
“This is a vote of confidence for the tech stack we’ve built, which makes blockchain scalable for mass use, and cuts transaction fees incurred by users,” said StarkWare co-founder and CEO Uri Kolodny. “We’re encouraged that VCs are signaling their strong support, even in the midst of a bear market,” he said.
STARKs, or scalable transparent arguments of knowledge, are a special sort of Zero-Knowledge Rollup used by StarkWare. StarkWare can use STARKs to build a second layer on top of Ethereum, where transactions are "rolled up" and delivered back to the mainnet for confirmation. STARKs inherit the Ethereum mainnet's security and decentralization while lowering gas rates by orders of magnitude and providing near-instant transaction finality.
StarkWare's StarkEx platform handles over 250,000 transactions each day, allowing apps like dYdX, Sorare, and Immutable X to take advantage of Ethereum's security for a fraction of the cost they would pay on the mainnet. The business is also developing StarkNet, a more generic scalability solution. While StarkEx is application-specific, StarkNet is a fully interoperable Layer 2 platform on which any developer can begin developing and deploying crypto applications.
In recent weeks, StarkWare isn't the first Layer 2 project to garner headlines. Optimism, a Layer 2 network based on Optimistic Rollup, announced the launch of its OP coin in April and plans to distribute it to early users via an airdrop. Other Ethereum scaling solutions, such as zkSync, have announced plans to decentralize their networks through token offerings, but StarkWare has yet to confirm or refute plans to do so.