OKX Ventures Makes a Seed Round Investment in Type 2.5 ZkEVM Kakarot

Singapore, November 16, 2023 -- OKX Ventures, the investment arm of leading Web3 technology company OKX, today announced its seed round investment in Kakarot, a Type 2.5 Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) written in Cairo, a Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge (STARK)-based Turing-complete language for writing provable programs on blockchain. Kakarot aims to scale Ethereum by leveraging the capabilities of Cairo and Starkware's technology.

Kakarot started as a community initiative during a Starknet Hacker House in October 2022 and has since evolved into a company with a mission to enable Ethereum's scalability. With strong community engagement and the power of Cairo, developed by the Starkware team, Kakarot achieved full 'Operation Code' (opcode) equivalence in just two and a half months; opcode is a primitive code or instruction that enables the programming of operations within a blockchain.

OKX Ventures Founder Dora Yue said: "We are honored to participate in the seed round of investment in Kakarot, a Cairo language-based zkEVM. Kakarot is built on Starknet, utilizing an innovative coding language that resolves the issue of Starknet's incompatibility with EVMs. This advancement enables the Ethereum ecosystem to flourish on Starknet."

Kakarot is currently preparing to launch its inaugural testnet, which will serve as both a Layer-2 on Ethereum and a Layer-3 on StarkNet, a decentralized Layer-2 network that enables Ethereum to scale securely and DApps to achieve unlimited scale for transactions and computation. In addition, Karakot has ambitions to become a Type-1 zkEVM, allowing any Layer-1 node to generate STARK proofs. The project is also exploring the development of other zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction and scaling solutions to contribute to the ongoing development of the Web3 space.