StarkWare CEO Uri Kolodny steps down, Eli Ben-Sasson takes over

Uri Kolodny, the chief executive officer and co-founder of the Ethereum Layer 2 developer StarkWare Industries, has resigned from the CEO role due to “vicious medical challenges at home” that need his “undivided attention.”

“I took a LoA [leave of absence] a year ago, but unfortunately that wasn’t nearly enough,” Kolodny wrote on X. He will stay on as a board member of both StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation.

StarkWare co-founder and president Eli Ben-Sasson is taking over as StarkWare’s CEO. “I am sure he will lead StarkWare forward with talent and devotion, to great heights,” Kolodny said.

Ben-Sasson is also co-inventor of STARK (Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge) — the type of cryptographic proof that StarkWare utilizes for its network to be submitted on the Ethereum blockchain for execution. As an Ethereum Layer 2, Starknet processes transactions on its network and then provides STARK proofs to Ethereum for execution, reducing Ethereum’s load and resulting in faster and cheaper transactions.

StarkWare background

StarkWare, based in Israel, was founded in 2018. It is backed by high-profile investors — including Sequoia Capital, Paradigm and Coatue. The company was valued at $8 billion when it raised $100 million in a Series D funding round in May 2022. StarkWare has raised a total of $261 million in funding to date.

StarkWare has two main offerings: StarkEx, a permissioned network tailored to the specific requirements of decentralized applications, and Starknet, a permissionless Layer 2 network that allows anyone to build decentralized applications or dapps on it.

Starknet is set to have its native token, called STRK — which is expected to unlock in April this year. The total supply of STRK tokens is ten billion, and STRK will be used to cover transaction fees, governance, and staking within the Starknet network.

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