StarkWare Industries, a prominent Ethereum Layer-2 developer, has announced a significant change in its leadership. Uri Kolodny, co-founder and CEO, has resigned due to health issues that require his full attention. He made this announcement on social media platform X, stating that he will continue to serve on the boards of StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation.
Eli Ben-Sasson, also a co-founder and current president of StarkWare, will take over as CEO. Ben-Sasson is known for his work on STARK (Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge), a cryptographic proof utilized by StarkWare’s network on the Ethereum blockchain. Starknet, as an Ethereum Layer-2 protocol, processes transactions on its network and provides STARK proofs to Ethereum, reducing its load and enabling faster and cheaper transactions.
StarkWare was founded in 2018 and has attracted significant investors such as Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, and Coatue. The company has raised a total of $261 million in funding, with a notable $100 million raised in its Series D round in May 2022, valuing the company at $8 billion.
The company offers two main products: StarkEx, a permissioned network tailored to the specific needs of decentralized applications, and Starknet, a Layer-2 network that allows users to create decentralized applications or dapps. Starknet is expected to launch its native token, STRK, in April of this year, with a total supply of ten billion, to be used for transaction fees, governance, and staking within the Starknet network.