“I expect that at some point, the ability to run much more massive computation with a very low gas footprint will lead to completely new and unforeseen applications that are going to be far more important.”

Biography:

Eli Ben-Sasson is the president, co-founder and chairman of StarkWare Industries Ltd., a blockchain development company launched in 2018 to focus on the technology’s scalability, security and privacy. He is a founding scientist of the Zcash Company and co-inventor of the ZK-STARK, FRI and Zerocash protocols.

Ben-Sasson studied computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where he received his PhD in theoretical computer science in 2001. Since then, he has researched cryptographic and zero-knowledge proofs of computational integrity. 

Between 2001 and 2005, he held research positions at Harvard University, MIT and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. More recently, he was a professor of computer science at Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, which he left to help launch StarkWare.

Ben-Sasson’s 2022:

In May 2022, StarkWare’s estimated value was $8 billion, an increase from $2 billion six months earlier, echoing the implementation of its ecosystems which range from digital asset trading solutions to NFT minting and deployment. In November, StarkNet Token started to be deployed on the Ethereum mainnet, although the tokens have not yet been offered for sale and won’t be until further notice. The tokens are held by StarkWare shareholders, employees and independent partner software developers. 

In November, Ben-Sasson’s company announced the open-sourcing of Cairo 1.0, the language for creating STARK-provable programs for general computation. Cairo is the tool that powers StarkEx, which scales applications on the Ethereum Mainnet and the native smart contract language for StarkNet, a permissionless decentralized Validity-Rollup (often referred to as zk-Rollups). The platform is an L2 network built over Ethereum, enabling any DApp to achieve unlimited scale for its computation.

Ben-Sasson had a fruitful 2022, with StarkNet announcing that 123 projects were built on the chain, while StarkWare saw a total of around 365,330 new wallets being created and used for multiple purposes.

Ben-Sasson’s 2023:

At the beginning of 2023, the company’s exchange, StarkEx, declared $749 billion in cumulative trading, $497 million of total value locked, a total of 309 million transactions across all deployments and 93 million NFTs minted.

Ben-Sasson’s solutions indicate a promising 2023, starting with new features that will be added to Cairo 1.0 to make it safer and more accessible for developers to write StarkNet contracts. In particular, a package manager and a proper development framework for testing and deployment will be added with the aim of making writing contracts on StarkNet very straightforward.

After its launch in 2021, StarkNet focused on functionality, while its new roadmap touts improvements surrounding performance and scalability, with higher transactions per second being indicated for 2023. Significant upgrades are expected across the StarkWare solutions, particularly in building L3 networks with hyper-scaling, app-specific requirements, and privacy, which Ben-Sasson appears to be particularly proud of. 

More collaboration with the Ethereum community is expected in 2023 through the StarkWare Sessions, a series of events held kicking off at the end of January that aim to build the future for both ecosystems.