Ethereum second-layer developer StarkWare is valued at $ 2 billion after raising $ 50 million

StarkWare is based in Israel announced 16 via Twitter that it raised $ 50 million in a financing round from Sequence C and that the company is now valued at $ 2 billion. Sequoia Funds is, among other things, the main investor. Seven months ago, StarkWare raised $ 75 million in a Paradigm-led funding for Collection B.

We’re excited to announce that our Sequence C is $ 50 million to $ 2 billion.

A big thank you to our main investor, @Redwoodtree, our great investor watchers and dozens of partners and ecosystem workers took part in this round to vote on trust in our products and technologies. pic.twitter.com/CuaeMSf2s6

– StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) November 16, 2021

This news comes ahead of the launch of StarkNet Alpha 2, an upgrade to zero information rollup, or ZK rollup technology, on the Ethereum Mainnet that is currently slated to roll out in late November contracts and will scale the technology to anyone who builds on it would like to.

StarkWare is one of the few Layer-Two scaling protocols for Ethereum that has seen massive adoption recently despite soaring gasoline prices. Its StarkEx L2 scalability engine already enables partners such as the dYdX trading platform to send transactions in ZK rollups on-chain. This minimizes transaction fees by reducing the amount of gas. The dYdX exchange recently released its governance token, DYDX, and its airdrop topped $ 100,000 for the most active users.

There are two main types of rollup technologies, AC and optimistic rollups. While optimistic aggregates assume valid transactions by default and only perform calculations, ZK backups generate zero-knowledge evidence for the validation of transactions and continuously send this evidence to the Ethereum mainnet. With ZK-Rollup, block validation and transfers are faster and cheaper because less data is contained.

Starkware’s L2 competitor Polygon is also launching the zk-STARK-powered Miden Virtual Machine for the development of decentralized applications, also known as DApps.