StarkWare, a Polygon challenger, hits $2 billion valuation
Starkware, a Layer 2 solution on Ethereum, has announced that it has raised $50 million in its Series C led by Sequoia Capital which improves its valuation to $2 billion as it begins to set its sights on bigger things.
As the crypto industry has exploded over the last year or so, we have seen networks like Ethereum begin to struggle while other networks like Polygon, StarkWare, and Solana are making the most of it as they offer lower fees and higher speed. Polygon and StarkWare are Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum and they are looking to resolve the scaling issues that Ethereum seems to be suffering with. Investors have also been quick to notice the startups that are working in this space and have been generally very supportive of the same. The company is expected to use this funding to build out the StarkNet platform on which developers would be able to build their applications.
“The main thing that distinguishes us in the L2 ecosystem… is that we are servicing the largest throughput today in terms of both transactions and volume across all the [L2] solutions out there,” co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson said. “We’ve settled over $200 billion and settled over 50 million transactions.”
The network already hosts some of the star applications like dYdX, Sorare, and others and it would be looking forward to onboarding many more applications on its network which will then be able to bring along even more users and volume as well. StarkWare’s scaling solution is a zero-knowledge rollup, something that is worked on by Polygon Hermez also at this time; it processes several transactions on its platform, bundles them into a single one, and inscribes the bundled data to the Ethereum network. Unlike the other groups that are in existence now, the StarkWare solution does not depend on validators but they make use of cryptography to mathematically confirm that everything is in order before it is pushed into the blockchain.
The StarkNet L2 has been under public testing for many months now and it is expected that it would be rolled into the Ethereum mainnet later in the month. The platform would hope that this would lead to more developers moving into the network and developing innovative applications which make use of the StarkWare solution.
