Key Takeaways
- StarkWare has raised an additional $50 million from investors, valuing the company at $2 billion.
- The elevate comes weeks earlier than the birth of the highly-anticipated StarkNet Alpha.
- StarkNet Alpha will enable anybody to deploy shapely contracts utilizing StarkWare’s ZK-Rollups.
ZK-Rollup developer StarkWare has raised $50 million in a Series C funding spherical that values the firm at $2 billion. The corporate plans to birth StarkNet Alpha on Ethereum mainnet by the cease of November.
StarkWare Will enhance Valuation
Correct weeks earlier than StarkNet Alpha’s mainnet birth, investors are doubling down.
The ZK-Rollup developer introduced the cease of its Series C funding spherical Tuesday after elevating $50 million from quite a lot of existing investors. Sequoia Capital led the spherical, with funding funds Paradigm, Three Arrows Capital, Alameda Compare, and Founders Fund also taking share.
We are mad to suppose our Series C of $50M at $2B.
A substantial due to our lead investor, @sequoia, our noteworthy issue-on investors, and the handfuls of ecosystem partners and collaborators who participated in this spherical, for their vote of self belief in our merchandise and tech. pic.twitter.com/CuaeMSf2s6
— StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) November 16, 2021
StarkWare uses ZK-Rollups to scale Ethereum. ZK-Rollups bundle transactions off-chain and trust ZK-SNARKs, which acquire submitted to the imperfect chain. They permit for sooner transactions with seriously reduced gas charges. Rollup know-how in the intervening time comes in two flavors—ZK and Optimistic. Optimistic Rollups corresponding to Arbitrum and Optimism rely on trust between events, resulting in a scenario duration the save anybody can dispute the legitimacy of a transaction. This means it would eliminate in to per week for customers to transfer funds support to Ethereum mainnet. Nonetheless, ZK-Rollups put up proofs to the mainnet persistently, allowing customers to transfer funds support without prolong.
In the mean time, StarkWare has integrated StarkEx, its ZK-Rollup scaling engine, into quite a lot of crypto tasks such because the decentralized commerce dYdX and the fantasy soccer NFT platform Sorare. Nonetheless, with the birth of StarkNet Alpha planned later this month, builders will likely be in a position to independently birth shapely contracts on the network, opening up the scaling know-how to whoever wants to construct on it.
As gas charges and congestion on Ethereum demonstrate no signs of decreasing, competitors for effective scaling solutions is heating up. In September, Enya and OMG Network launched an Optimistic Rollup solution called Boba Network, aiming to diminish the scenario duration time and streamline withdrawals.
Earlier at the present time, meanwhile, Layer 2 Polygon unveiled its contain ZK-Rollup called Miden, developed below Polygon’s $1 billion fund allocated to ZK-based totally mostly tasks. Miden will compete with existing ZK-Rollups corresponding to zkSync, Loopring, and StarkWare’s upcoming StarkNet to give scaling solutions for Ethereum dApps.
