Sequoia Supports $2 Billion Blockchain Expansion Startup StarkWare

As the  world of cryptocurrencies continues to heat up, developers are obsessed with the Ethereum network despite a concerted struggle to overcome the stress of the global network's transactional load. In order to speed up transactions and reduce costs on Ethereum, developers are turning to the so-called Layer 2 (L2) blockchain, which is built on the Ethereum network to remove the computing load and maintain a record of transaction data on the main network. .

StarkWare, which builds an Ethereum scaling solution called StarkNet, has just closed its $50 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital. The move comes just months after raising $75 million in Series B, led by Paradigm, a cryptocurrency venture capital firm founded by former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Huang.

This recent hike brings Israeli startups to a whopping $2 billion.  As the Ethereum network continues to gain popularity despite the traction of competing blockchains with greater efficiency, investors are investing more money for infrastructure startups  to help Ethereum scale to more users and more transactions. started investing. Earlier this month, TechCrunch covered the rise of Series B at Matter Labs with support from Andreessen Horowitz. In August, Lightspeed raised the value of its blockchain scaling company by $1.2 billion to support startup Offchain Labs.

Sequoia is one of the most recognizable investment firms in the tech space, but has been slow to fully embrace crypto startups, leaving competitors like Andreessen Horowitz an opportunity to support early players through dedicated funds. Sequoia first supported StarkWare  in 2018, but this is their first time leading a startup round. According to a recent report by Information, a quarter of Sequoia's new investments this year were  in blockchain startups.

"The most important thing that sets us apart in the L2 ecosystem is that ... we offer the highest bandwidth natively today in terms of trade and volume for all  [L2] solutions available," said co-founder Eli BenSasson. told TechCrunch. “We paid over $200 billion and made over 50 million transactions.”

The StarkWare exclusive extension solution is  a so-called zero-knowledge accumulation package. The platform processes a series of transactions  and writes related data to the Ethereum network. Unlike competitive "optimistic summary data", which relies on a network of validators to ensure legitimacy once the combined data is  published, zero-verification proofs use encryption to mathematically verify that everything is correct before it is published.

Although these cryptographic proofs require more computational effort than other solutions,  their more secure architecture has led many developers to believe that this is the future of scalability for the Ethereum network.

Some StarkWare clients include ConsenSys, Immutable, dYdX, and Sorare. The startup is currently preparing to launch the Ethereum mainnet  later this month with StarkNet L2 after several months of public testing.

CEO Uri Kolodny told TechCrunch, "[our assessment] shows that the investment community is realizing that expecting and scaling a lot in the  blockchain space without permission is a must-have feature to actually implement and deploy." "And that's what we're going to do in  two weeks."