Michael Riabzev is the Co-Founder & Chief-Architect at StarkWare Industries, the developer of the permissionless Validity-Rollup (ZK-Rollup) Layer 2 network operating on Ethereum, Starknet. ^[1][2][3]

Education

Michael Riabzev attended Technion - Israel Institute of Technology where he earned a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2014. Afterwards, he studied for a Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Computer Science where he focused on the development of practical systems for computational integrity in zero-knowledge, culminating in the development and implementation of the zk-STARK system. ^[1]

Career

Michael Riabzev started his in 2002 career as a Systems Administrator at Afulas Community Center. In October 2004, he moved to the Israeli Intelligence Service and served as an R&D Engineer & IT Architect until October 2008. Afterward, he worked as an R&D Engineer at KCS - Knowledge Control Systems until October 2009. ^[1]

In December 2019, Riabzev joined Intel Corporation^[7] as a Research And Development Engineer and then served in the same role at IBM^[8] from 2012 to 2013. He is also a Researcher PhD Student, and Development Engineer at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. ^[1]

StarkWare

In 2018, Michael Ziabrev co-founded StarkWare alongside Eli Ben-Sasson, Uri Kolodny, and Alessandro Chiesa. He serves as the Chief Architect of the company. ^[4]

StarkWare Industries Ltd. is a blockchain technology company based in Israel, focusing on developing ZK-Rollup technology and building products to solve the challenges of the Ethereum network. Besides the technology infrastructure, Its main two products are StarkEx and StarkNet. [6]

StarkEx

StarkEx is the Validium L2 scaling engine on Ethereum mainnet that is modified (tailored) to fit specific permissioned Dapps, used for projects to deploy their ideas (mostly for trading use cases) dYdX, ImmutableX, DeversiFi, and many other partners. This Specific L2 is where most protocols are built on, generating real trading volume and conducting transactions. ^[5]

Starknet

Starknet is built based on STARK as the decentralized L2 Zk-rollup. The layer is responsible for executing transactions while scaling without the security sacrifice of Ethereum. STARK developers can write smart contracts and run them permissionlessly on Starknet. ^[6]

Starknet aims to achieve secure low-cost transactions and high performance by using the STARK cryptographic proof system. Starknet contracts and the Starknet OS are written in Cairo, a custom-built and specialized programming language. ^[6]