Eli Ben-Sasson

Eli Ben-Sasson is a professor of computer science at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology — and the co-founder and president of StarkWare Industries. He is one of the primary inventors of zk-STARKs (Succinct Transparent ARguments of Knowledge), a breakthrough zero-knowledge proof system that is scalable, quantum-resistant, and requires no trusted setup — properties that distinguish it from the competing zk-SNARK approach.

Ben-Sasson spent decades in academic cryptography before commercialising his research. His work at the Weizmann Institute of Science and later at Technion produced fundamental contributions to interactive proof systems, probabilistically checkable proofs, and the complexity theory underlying modern zero-knowledge cryptography. The zk-STARK paper, co-authored with Ben-Sasson and colleagues, was published in 2018 and immediately recognised as a landmark contribution to applied cryptography.

Zero-knowledge proofs allow one party to prove the truth of a statement to another without revealing any information beyond the validity of that statement. In a blockchain context, this means a prover can demonstrate that thousands of transactions are valid — that signatures are correct, balances are sufficient, rules are followed — and produce a single small proof that any verifier can check cheaply. This compression of computation is the foundation of ZK-rollup scaling.

zk-STARKs have several key advantages over the competing zk-SNARKs used by protocols like Zcash and StarkWare's rival zkSync. Most importantly, STARKs require no trusted setup ceremony — the process by which SNARK parameters are generated requires a small group of participants to collectively destroy a 'toxic waste' key; if any single participant cheats, the entire system is compromised. STARKs, by contrast, rely only on hash functions and public randomness, eliminating this trust assumption entirely.

The STARK proof system is also post-quantum secure — it does not rely on elliptic curve cryptography that could be broken by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. As quantum computing matures, this property may prove critical. Ben-Sasson has consistently argued that the transparency and long-term security of STARKs make them the superior choice for infrastructure that must remain trustworthy decades into the future.

StarkWare was founded in 2018 by Ben-Sasson alongside Avi Wigderson, Michael Riabzev, and Alessandro Chiesa. The company raised over $250 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Its first product, StarkEx, was a scalability engine for exchanges and DeFi applications — used by dYdX, Immutable X, and Sorare to process millions of transactions off-chain with on-chain STARK proofs.

Starknet, launched progressively from 2021 to 2023, is StarkWare's permissionless Layer-2 network on Ethereum. Unlike StarkEx, which is a custom scaling solution for individual applications, Starknet is a general-purpose ZK-rollup that any developer can deploy smart contracts on. Starknet uses Cairo — a custom programming language designed for STARK-provable computation — enabling developers to write smart contracts that are natively provable.

The STRK governance token was launched in February 2024 with a large community airdrop. Starknet's unique architecture — including its account abstraction by default, native fee payment in STRK or ETH, and Cairo's expressive computation model — has attracted a dedicated developer community building applications that cannot be feasibly deployed on other platforms.

Ben-Sasson's broader vision extends beyond Ethereum scaling. He has argued consistently that STARK proofs will become a general-purpose tool for verifiable computation across all domains: financial systems, identity verification, private machine learning inference, and more. The ability to prove any computation was performed correctly, without revealing the inputs, is a fundamental primitive for a world that requires both transparency and privacy.

His academic work continues alongside his commercial activities. Ben-Sasson has published papers on recursive STARK proofs — proofs of proofs, enabling exponential compression of computation — and on the complexity-theoretic foundations of the interactive oracle proofs that underlie the STARK system. This dual role as practitioner and theorist gives him unusual credibility in both research and industry circles.

Ben-Sasson has been a consistent advocate for Israel's cryptography and blockchain development community. StarkWare's Tel Aviv headquarters has become a hub for zero-knowledge research globally, and several of the world's leading ZK cryptographers have passed through or collaborated with the StarkWare team. His personal academic contributions, combined with StarkWare's commercial success, make him one of the most intellectually impactful figures in the Ethereum scaling ecosystem.