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Co-Founder & CEO
Eli Ben-Sasson is CEO and Co-Founder of StarkWare Industries, a role he has held since February 2024, having previously served as President and Chairman of the Board from 2020. StarkWare develops ZK-Rollup technology for blockchain scaling, with its two principal products being StarkEx, a Validium L2 scaling engine on Ethereum, and Starknet, a permissionless Validity-Rollup Layer 2 network. Ben-Sasson co-founded StarkWare in 2018 alongside Uri Kolodny, Michael Riabzev, and Alessandro Chiesa. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Ben-Sasson co-invented the STARK and FRI protocols, which produce a class of zero-knowledge proof offering quantum-resistance, quasi-linear proof time, polylogarithmic verification time, and transparency through the absence of secret keys. He was also a co-inventor of the Zerocash protocol, which formed the basis of Zcash, and remains a Founding Scientist at Electric Coin Company. In 2014, the Zerocash research received the IEEE Test of Time Award. StarkWare is currently working to expand Starknet's STARK proof verification to Bitcoin, with a planned three-phase approach involving an indexer-based first step, integration with BitVM, and eventual support for a Bitcoin soft fork such as OPCAT. Ben-Sasson earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2001, under the supervision of Professor Avi Wigderson, and subsequently completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard and MIT. He joined the Technion faculty in 2005 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2015, a position he held until leaving in 2020.
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