SkarkWare, StarkEx, what's all this?

StarkWare was founded in 2017 by Uri Kolodny (CEO), Eli Ben-Sasson (President) Michael Riabzev (Chief Architect) and Alessandro Chiesa (Chief Scientist).
It raised a $30 million round A in October of 2018, led by Paradigm, a fund set up by cryptocurrency investors Matt Huang, formerly a partner at Sequoia Capital, and Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase. Coinbase, Sequoia Capital, and Intel Capital also participated in the round, which brought StarkWare’s capital funding to $36 million. Another notable investor in the company is Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of Ethereum.

It is one of a few blockchain startups that have built Ethereum scaling products using rollups technology.

There are mainly two types of rollups — ZK-rollups and Optimistic rollups — that allow executing Ethereum transactions off-chain and storing only transaction data on-chain, thereby reducing the network congestion, increasing its speed, and reducing gas fees.

StarkWare uses ZK-rollups for its scaling technology. As opposed to Optimistic rollups, ZK-rollups generate zero-knowledge proofs for validating transactions.

StarkWare's Ethereum scaling engine StarkEx is used by several crypto projects, including dYdX, Sorare, and Immutable.

StarkWare is now set to launch StarkNet Alpha on mainnet Ethereum by the end of this month, said Uri Kolodny.
The key difference between StarkEx and StarkNet is that the former is a permissioned tailor-made scaling engine, while the latter is a permissionless decentralized ZK-rollup that supports independent deployment of smart contracts. That means with StarkNet, any developer can write and deploy their smart contracts permissionlessly, like on Ethereum.

StarkWare hopes to bring "crypto apps for all" with StarkNet. StarkWare's another co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson said in an interview that StarkNet will help make blockchain technology "usable by a much wider population."

Immutable X is the first Ethereum Layer-2 protocol that is built for NFTs. 
Using StarkWare's technology, removing the gas fees for all the transactions made on the protocol, they benefit from the Ethereum network and its contracts, without the annoying high-gas-fees-part.

In addition, Immutable X aims to support a total of 200 million transactions per day, without exceeding 30% consumption of Ethereum network capacity. Not to mention that all of the NFTs created or traded on Immutable X are 100% carbon neutral.

The transaction speed offered by Immutable X is much faster than what can be found in the “classic” NFT market, which is a very good point for the collection creators and the community.