StarkWare
Israeli cryptography company that developed STARK zero-knowledge proof systems into production-grade infrastructure for scaling and validating computation on public blockchains.
StarkWare is an Israeli cryptography company that developed STARK proofs — a class of zero-knowledge proof systems — into production-grade infrastructure for scaling and validating computation on public blockchains. The company is headquartered in Netanya, Israel, and is the institutionally most significant Israeli company in the global crypto-protocol layer.
StarkWare was founded in 2018 by Eli Ben-Sasson, Uri Kolodny, Michael Riabzev, and Alessandro Chiesa. Ben-Sasson is the academic figure most identified with the development of the STARK family of proof systems and a long-tenured professor at the Technion.
Products and positioning
StarkWare's principal products are StarkEx, a permissioned scalability engine used by trading platforms including dYdX (historically), Sorare, and Immutable, and Starknet, a public permissionless general-purpose Layer 2 network on Ethereum settled with STARK proofs. The company also develops Cairo, a programming language designed for provable computation, and contributes to the open-source ZK-rollup tooling stack.
StarkWare competes within the Ethereum Layer 2 category alongside Polygon, zkSync (Matter Labs), Arbitrum, and Optimism, with the STARK family of proofs representing one of two principal cryptographic families used in zero-knowledge rollups, distinct from the SNARK family used by several peers.
Position in the Israeli crypto cohort
StarkWare is the most-cited Israeli company in the protocol layer of the global crypto stack and a primary reference point in any survey of Israel's footprint in zero-knowledge cryptography. Olam's deeper coverage of the company is published at StarkWare and the ZK Stack.
The company sits within the broader Israeli digital-asset infrastructure cohort that includes Fireblocks in institutional custody, GK8 (acquired by Galaxy Digital), Curv (acquired by Coinbase), and Bancor in decentralized exchange architecture.
