Edi Sinovčić, Founder and CEO of SpaceShard, talks about StarkWare, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and the future of Ethereum scaling.
Today, we caught up with Edi Sinovčić, our founder and CEO, to talk a bit more about SpaceShard & StarkWare, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and the future of Ethereum scaling.
Oh, Zero Knowledge space is far from new for me… 🙂 I’ve been in blockchain since 2017. I started as an Ethereum core contributor and one of my first contributions in the Ethereum space was to a project called Zokrates (toolbox for zkSNARKs on Ethereum) where I started my journey into the land of zk magic. Back then zk tech was more on a theoretical level and there were few teams actually building stuff around it.
After that, I had a small “detour” from zk and joined the Solidity team of EF and worked in the protocol development field alongside SC one, still as an engineer. One thing led to another, foundations for Shard Labs were set and in 2019 it was formally founded.
At the same time, I never stopped following the development of ZK stuff, and I ultimately switched back to it when we started collaborating with StarkWare on multiple fronts.
Due to the fantastic potential of ZK technology, we, as Shard Labs, decided to dedicate a whole “shard” to exploring this space.
Since I consider myself a scaling maximalist and firmly believe in the power that decentralization brings, I wanted to work on scaling a blockchain company in a truly decentralized manner. This is why we decided to implement full company sharding (or as we like to call it “human sharding”), starting with SpaceShard.
Sharding comes from the concept of data sharding on large databases. The reason why you shard the database into smaller parts is to make it more accessible and easier to manage.
That kind of thinking we have adopted with Shard Labs, where we grow a specific department to the point where it becomes self-sustaining, and then we “shard it” to run as a separate entity but reduced and flatter organizational structure.
SpaceShard started as a ZK department in Shard Labs but became a completely independent shard that is now a full-cycle company with its own R&D department that focuses on Zero-Knowledge Proof technology. SpaceShard is also an incubator and accelerator for building new products within the StarkWare ecosystem. Our goal is to build mass-adoption applications that abstract complexity not only of Zero-Knowledge technology but also blockchains and help improve UX through the advantages that Zero Knowledge technology brings to us.
We are finally entering the age of both scalable and also decentralized blockchains that ultimately bring us mass adoption! And not just through cheaper transactions but also through a more secure system, with improved UX. We’re getting the best of both worlds 🙂
Don’t be scared to deep dive into the rabbit hole! Every beginning is hard, but there is a huge open-source community that is all about helping each other to enter this amazing space of opportunities. Math can sometimes be overwhelming, but there are a lot of tools that help it abstract for you and make your journey even easier. And last but not least, here at SpaceShard we have multiple open positions so let us know if you’re up for a run! We are always open to curious new minds that are not afraid of challenges 💪
If you want to keep up with the news on what SpaceShard is currently working on, follow us on Twitter and Medium.
* This article is also available on SpaceShard Medium.