Today we are happy to announce that the Zcash Company has invested in StarkWare Industries, a new company developing STARKs. The Starkware announcement is available here. STARKs are a new cryptographic proof system which is scalable, toxic-waste-free, and post-quantum secure. STARKs may prove to be useful for building more secure and scalable blockchains, as well as potentially providing privacy and computational integrity to other applications beyond blockchains.
The creators of StarkWare Industries include Zcash founding scientists, professor Eli Ben-Sasson and professor Alessandro Chiesa.
The Zcash mission is to empower everyone with economic freedom and opportunity. We maintain that this can be achieved through decentralized, resilient, attack- and censorship-resistant cryptocurrencies with strong privacy. We believe that this is why Zcash is positioned to become de facto Internet Money.
The Zcash Company will continue to work on the forefront of innovation. We invest in research and engineering to bring our mission to life. And we believe in contributing to the work of others who serve the same ends, such as our contributions integrating zero-knowledge proofs into Ethereum and into J.P. Morgan Quorum.
Both Prof. Ben-Sasson and Prof. Chiesa continue to serve as advisors to the Zcash Company, and we look forward to collaborating with the StarkWare team to build the fundamental technologies needed — not only to support blockchain scale and privacy, but also to create technology that can benefit all future computation, economics and human society.