Israeli blockchain startup StarkWare Technologies Inc. today said it has raised $30 million in new funding to assist it in developing an authentication method known as zero-knowledge proof.

Zero-knowledge proof is the ability to prove that something exists or has taken place without exposing its content with the technology being useful in credit and money transfers.

One example is that a customer looking for a loan can answer questions with technology encrypting and saving the answers on a blockchain. Thereafter, the company offering the loan is only exposed to the information it needs, in this case, whether the applicant can or cannot receive the loan versus the applicants’ entire loan history. “The only thing disclosed on the blockchain is that the money transfer took place and meets a series of conditions, without disclosing the amount or exactly which conditions it did or did not meet,” Globes.co.il explained.

Founded at the beginning of this year by the University of California at Berkeley researcher Alessandro Chiesa, Eli Ben-Sasson and Michael Riabzev of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and Chief Executive Officer Uri Kolodny, StarkWare is commercializing the STARK zero-knowledge proof system.

It’s claimed to improve scalability and privacy in blockchains by providing cryptographic proofs that are zero-knowledge, succinct, transparent and secure. StarkWare is developing a “full proof” stack — software and hardware to “support fast and reliable generation and verification of computational integrity proofs for general computations.”

The Series A round was led by Paradigm and included Intel Capital, Sequoia, Atomico, DCVC, Wing, Consensys, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Collaborative Fund, Scalar Capital, Semantic Ventures, Pantera and Floodgate.

Including the new funding, StarkWare has raised $36 million to date. Matt Huang of Paradigm is joining StarkWare’s board of directors.

Image: StarkWare