Despite the current fall in cryptocurrency markets, Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 developer StarkWare has secured another $100 million in its newest fundraising round.
StarkWare’s valuation has risen to $8 billion in its Series D financing round, signifying a four-fold increase in value just six months after its Series C round in November 2021.
Greenoaks Capital, along with private equity company Coatue, Tiger Global, and other investors, led the newest fundraising round.
In 2022, StarkWare has established itself as a prominent player in the Ethereum layer-2 scaling arena, with transaction throughput exceeding that of the Bitcoin network and all other layer-2 platforms combined.
StarkWare claims it can add enormous batches of transactions to Ethereum’s mainnet by generating validity proofs, also known as zero-knowledge proofs in the industry.
Along with other computer scientists, co-founder and president Eli Ben-Sasson pioneered ZK-STARK cryptography. Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge is a proof system that encrypts and verifies transaction data using cutting-edge cryptography, providing security, scalability, and quantum computer resistance.
StarkWare’s two platforms, StarkEx and StarkNet, are built on technology that has proven to be popular. Popular nonfungible marketplaces Sorare, ImmutableX, and dYdX use StarkEx as their scaling engine, while StarkNet is a decentralized application development network.
Ben-Sasson and StarkWare co-founder and CEO Uri Kolodny discussed the current fundraising round with Cointelegraph, which was fueled by outsider investor interest in the layer-2 technology’s long-term potential.
“We feel we’re on a long, difficult, and demanding journey to design and develop technology that hasn’t existed before, and then bring it to market as a software product with an ecosystem.” All of this necessitates significant resources in order for us to concentrate on the long-term,” Kolodyny told Cointelegraph.
StarkWare plans to leverage its most recent $100 million investment round to expand its ecosystem around the software tools it is developing. Ben-Sasson also mentioned that StarkEx’s capabilities were a big appeal for investors, indicating that the platform would remain a focus for the company:
“Investors evaluation has to be based on proven, tested metrics and the current metrics are all coming from StarkEx. We minted more NFTs than any other platform, we’re settling more transactions today than Bitcoin and there have been weeks where we’ve settled more than Ethereum.”
These criteria, according to the StarkWare president, are reflected in the company’s $8 billion valuations, and the company’s goal is to build on StarkEx’s success while hoping that StarkNet continues to attract developers.
Given the mathematical theory behind it, Ben-Sasson stated that the underlying technology’s ability to attain present scalability and greater was not surprising. However, the ecosystem that has adopted StarkEx deserves credit:
“What is pleasantly surprising, and a lot of credit goes to the ecosystem and our initial partners Diversify, dYdX, Sorare and ImmutableX , is the ability to take this core technology that allows you to get integrity of computation at scale and bring it to end users in such a successful and effective manor.”
Despite the present dip in the cryptocurrency markets, the StarkWare co-founders think their fundraising efforts communicate to the wider ecosystem that savvy investors find a silver lining despite the bleak prognosis.
