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About StarkWare
StarkWare is a scaling team that engineers STARK proofs, operating StarkEx and Starknet to give dYdX, Immutable and others verifiable scaling and settlement. It solves Ethereum's high cost and throughput limits through a ZK proof system that generates validity proofs off-chain and settles on L1 via a rollup, with the S-two prover lifting efficiency roughly 100x and cutting latency to milliseconds; STRK20 and strkBTC brought confidential balances and private transfers to any ERC-20.
In 2026 StarkWare launched STRK20 and strkBTC, bringing confidential balances and private transfers to any ERC-20 and extending privacy beyond native assets. Its BTCFi path gives Bitcoin holders native yield on Starknet, but the hardware and compute cost of ZK proofs and the decentralization of the rollup sequencer remain the trade-off between throughput and censorship resistance.
In 2018 ZK researchers Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny founded StarkWare to engineer STARK proofs; StarkEx went live in June 2020, giving dYdX, Immutable and others verifiable scaling and settlement.
Starknet Alpha mainnet launched in November 2021; in May 2022 StarkWare raised a $100 million Series D at an $8 billion valuation, among the highest for any scaling team.
In February 2024 STRK launched with over 700 million tokens airdropped to roughly 1.3 million addresses; staking began that November, making Starknet the first major rollup to stake inside L2.
In 2025 the Grinta (v0.14.0) upgrade integrated the S-two prover, lifting efficiency roughly 100x and cutting latency to 500 milliseconds; Starknet reached Stage 1 with a decentralized sequencer and dual BTC-STRK staking.
StarkWare put its 2025 bet on BTCFi: over 1 billion STRK, about 23% of circulating supply, and some 700 BTC were staked, giving Bitcoin holders native yield on Starknet for the first time.
In 2026 StarkWare introduced STRK20 and strkBTC, bringing confidential balances and private transfers to any ERC-20; February brought Starkzap v2, with a roadmap toward settling on both Bitcoin and Ethereum at 10,000+ TPS.
In February 2026 StarkWare released Starkzap, a toolkit for consumer on-chain apps, with v2 folding confidential transfers and payments into a TypeScript SDK. The STRK20 and strkBTC products launched the same quarter rely on proof verification at the protocol level in Starknet v0.14.2, giving any ERC-20 an encrypted balance and letting bitcoin enter the same privacy pool as a wrapper redeemable one-to-one for native BTC.
StarkWare's S-two prover is running on mainnet, and moving from Cairo-based to circuit-based recursion cut proving latency and compute by about 95%, to the point where an ordinary laptop can generate proofs; official benchmarks put it roughly 39 times faster than SP1 and 28 times faster than R0VM. The company frames this as the precondition for client-side proving on phones and browsers and for decentralising the proving layer itself.
StarkWare's roadmap still ends with Starknet settling on both Bitcoin and Ethereum above 10,000 TPS, but 2026 pushed the company down another track: chain revenue fell from nearly $6 million in a single month in late 2023 to about $48,000 by mid-April 2026, and the company split into two independent business units with job cuts, adding an applications unit to build revenue-generating products rivals cannot copy and to depend less on external L1s. Its quantum-safe Bitcoin scheme QSB and OP_CAT research are the technical cards behind that differentiation, though at $75 to $200 per transaction the commercial path is unproven. Starknet's TVL still sits above $200 million, so what remains is applications and assets rather than fees.
Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-Founder and CEO. He earned a PhD in theoretical computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under Avi Wigderson, held research posts at Harvard, MIT and the Institute for Advanced Study, was a Technion professor, co-invented zk-STARKs, co-founded StarkWare in 2018 and added the CEO role in February 2024.
Uri Kolodny, Co-Founder and Board Member. A serial entrepreneur who earlier founded companies in optical fiber and data visualization, he co-founded StarkWare with Ben-Sasson in 2018 as its first CEO and after stepping down in 2024 stayed on the board and the Starknet Foundation.
Avihu Levy, General Manager of Applications. A veteran blockchain and payments entrepreneur, he is co-founder and vice chairman of Blockchain.com and co-founder and chairman of SkysTheLimit.org, and now runs the applications team.
Ran Grinshtein, CFO. He holds master's degrees in legal studies from Bar-Ilan University and public policy from Tel Aviv University, earlier handled finance and SEC reporting in the medical device industry and now runs finance and budgeting.
StarkWare's recent team change: General Counsel Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos (KK Kirkbos) departed in July 2026, ending a tenure that began in September 2024. She subsequently joined Chainlink Labs as Head of Legal. Bos previously held legal leadership roles at Cboe Digital and Maple Finance, bringing extensive experience across both CeFi and DeFi. Her departure marks a significant personnel shift for StarkWare.