Starkware

communitas capital portfolio starkware
communitas capital portfolio starkware

Overview

Headquarters: Israel.

Commercializes the STARK zero-knowledge proof system to solve two of the main challenges in the blockchain space: privacy and scalability.

  • The platform allows for shielded transactions (payments, staking, voting, etc.) without the need for a trusted setup, with lean cryptography that is post-quantum secure.
  • The company’s proprietary technology allows for massive increase to transaction throughput as well as any off-chain computation to be verified on-chain at an exponentially lower cost.

Investment Thesis & Terms

We expect the company to be able to generate income from its “Prover Nodes”.

  • Providing shielded-tx functionality over Ethereum for layer-1 (ETH) and layer-2 (ERC-20, for example) tokens.
  • Integrating STARK-based shielded transaction functionality into multiple blockchains, in exchange for cash/tokens.

In the long term, we expect the company to generate recurring fees from users in order to compress large batches of transactions, thereby lowering users’ costs and increasing the network’s throughput.