StarkWare Industries, inventor of technology to make blockchain scalable for mass adoption, has raised $100 million at a valuation of $8 billion.
The company has deployed STARKs, a class of mathematical systems developed by company co-founder and president Eli Ben-Sasson and other computer scientists, which they say enables far more efficient use of blockchain.
It cuts fees by reducing the amount of information written to the blockchain, speeds up transactions and provides a way for blockchain to scale without any dilution of its original vision.
StarkWare’s first platform, StarkEx, in use for two years, today handles more transactions than Bitcoin. It compresses them using STARKs, before adding them to the Ethereum blockchain.
Businesses in finance and NFTs use StarkEx to overcome the problem of crippling congestion on blockchain, which causes delays and high transaction fees. Blockchain use is made cheaper and faster.
Applications have used StarkEx to facilitate transactions of more than half a trillion dollars.
StarkWare’s Series D funding comes six months after its Series C which valued the company at $2 billion.
The new round led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue, and includes Tiger Global and other new and existing investors. There is a secondary transaction as part of the round, in which employees company-wide are selling stocks.
“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.
“The math-based technology we’ve rolled out, known as STARKs, will serve businesses and the crypto community through thick and thin. We’re encouraged that VCs are signaling their strong support, even in the midst of a bear market.”
The company says it has become hugely popular for facilitating the minting and trading of NFTs, making minting 20,000 times cheaper than transacting directly on Ethereum. It also has NFT services via fantasy soccer game Sorare and carbon-neutral platform Immutable X.
Ben-Sasson said: “Tomorrow’s tech and economy will be heavily based on blockchain, and absolutely everyone developing it needs a solution to the congestion and high transaction fees we see today.
“We’re delivering this to clients via StarkEx, which is saving them millions of dollars in transaction fees weekly and opening up new possibilities for them.
“But we want everyone to be able to use our tech, so we are building and constantly improving StarkNet, in the hope it will empower any developer to build ultra-efficient blockchain apps.”