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Eli Ben-Sasson

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Eli Ben-Sasson

Eli Ben-Sasson (Hebrew: אלי בן-ששון) is an Israeli computer scientist known for his work on zero-knowledge proofs. He is also the co-founder and CEO of StarkWare Industries, a Founding Scientist of Zcash, and a former Professor of Computer Science at Technion.

Career

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Ben-Sasson studied theoretical computer science at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning his PhD in 2001 under the supervision of Prof. Avi Wigderson.[1][2]He then completed his Postdoctoral Studies at Harvard and MIT.[3][1]In 2005, Ben-Sasson joined the faculty of the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion as Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor). In 2009, he received the Henry Taub Award for Academic Excellence.[4] In 2010, Ben-Sasson was promoted to  Associate Professor at the Technion and in 2015 was promoted again to Full Professor, a position he held till he left Technion in 2020. He researched theoretical computer science and Computational complexity theory.[3]

In the early 2000s, Ben-Sasson published a series of articles on short, efficiently testable proofs, including quasi-linear length PCP proofs,[5] He later published theoretical and practical improvements of these methods.[6][7][8][9]

In 2013, Ben-Sasson lectured about his research on Zero-knowledge proof at a Bitcoin conference and introduced the potential benefit of Zero-knowledge to Increase Bitcoin scalability.[10] He then met with early crypto pioneers, including Vitalik Buterin and Greg Maxwell, and raised awareness for the use of Zero-knowledge proof in crypto. Following that, he began working towards the practical realization of his research in the field of crypto and blockchain.[3]

In 2014, Ben-Sasson and other researchers collaborated on Zerocash, a design for a private cryptocurrency based on zero-knowledge proofs.[11] This research won the 2024 IEEE Test of Time Award.[12] Ben-Sasson later became a founding scientist of Zcash, which was based on the Zerocash design.[13]

In 2018, Ben-Sasson and other researchers invented STARKs and FRI protocols, which together created a type of zero-knowledge proof with several unique traits: (1) protection against quantum computers, (2) quasi-linear proof time, (3) polylogarithmic verification time, and (4) transparency, which means no dependence on secret keys.[14][15][16][17] Later that year, Ben-Sasson co-founded StarkWare Industries alongside Uri Kolodny (who served as its first CEO), Michael Riabzev (his PhD student) and Alessandro Chiesa. StarkWare offers scaling solutions for blockchains using STARK techniques. Since February 2024 Ben-Sasson has been both CEO and president of the company.[18][19]

In April 2019, Technion sued Ben-Sasson along with his PhD student and co-founder Michael Riabzev and others, alleging that StarkWare Industries was based on intellectual property developed at the university.[20] The institute demanded 50% of Ben-Sasson's stake in the company. Ben-Sasson maintained that the company used employees' knowledge and open source code, but no invention belonging to the Technion.[21] No patents or other IP claims were submitted by Techion since then, and in 2020 the two sides reached an agreement before the case reached the court.

References

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  1. ^ a b "Eli Ben-Sasson". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
  2. ^ "*Expansion in Proof Complexity* Thesis submitted for the degree Doctor of Philosophy by Eli Ben-Sasson".
  3. ^ a b c "Geekonomy - פרק #974 – פרופ׳ אלי בן-ששון". Geekonomy (in Hebrew). 2024-11-27. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  4. ^ "חדשות | הפקולטה למדעי המחשב טאוב, הטכניון". cs.technion.ac.il. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  5. ^ Ben-Sasson, Eli; Sudan, Madhu (2005-05-22). "Simple PCPS with poly-log rate and query complexity". Proceedings of the thirty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing. STOC '05. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 266–275. doi:10.1145/1060590.1060631. ISBN 978-1-58113-960-0.
  6. ^ Ben-Sasson, Eli; Bentov, Iddo; Horesh, Yinon; Riabzev, Michael (2019). "Scalable Zero Knowledge with No Trusted Setup". In Boldyreva, Alexandra; Micciancio, Daniele (eds.). Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 11694. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 701–732. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-26954-8_23. ISBN 978-3-030-26954-8.
  7. ^ Ben-Sasson, Eli; Bentov, Iddo; Horesh, Yinon; Riabzev, Michael (2018). Chatzigiannakis, Ioannis; Kaklamanis, Christos; Marx, Dániel; Sannella, Donald (eds.). "Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs of Proximity". 45th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs). 107. Dagstuhl, Germany: Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik: 14:1–14:17. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.14. ISBN 978-3-95977-076-7.
  8. ^ Ben-Sasson, Eli; Chiesa, Alessandro; Spooner, Nicholas (2016). "Interactive Oracle Proofs". In Hirt, Martin; Smith, Adam (eds.). Theory of Cryptography. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 9986. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. pp. 31–60. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-53644-5_2. ISBN 978-3-662-53644-5.
  9. ^ Ben-Sasson, Eli; Chiesa, Alessandro; Genkin, Daniel; Tromer, Eran (2013-06-01). "On the concrete efficiency of probabilistically-checkable proofs". Proceedings of the forty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing. STOC '13. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 585–594. doi:10.1145/2488608.2488681. ISBN 978-1-4503-2029-0.
  10. ^ Eli Ben-Sasson (2017-07-06). Computational Integrity - applications to Bitcoin (ZCash pre-history). Retrieved 2025-06-09 – via YouTube.
  11. ^ Ben Sasson, Eli; Chiesa, Alessandro; Garman, Christina; Green, Matthew; Miers, Ian; Tromer, Eran; Virza, Madars (2014). "Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin". 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. pp. 459–474. doi:10.1109/SP.2014.36. ISBN 978-1-4799-4686-0.
  12. ^ "White paper that birthed crypto ZK-proofs receives IEEE 'Test of Time' award". Cointelegraph. 2024-05-20. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  13. ^ "Zk-Starks? New Take on Zcash Tech Could Power Truly Private Blockchains". CoinDesk. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  14. ^ Ben-Sasson, Eli; Bentov, Iddo; Horesh, Yinon; Riabzev, Michael (2018), Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity, 2018/046, retrieved 2025-06-09
  15. ^ page, Sharon Wrobel You will receive email alerts from this author Manage alert preferences on your profile page You will no longer receive email alerts from this author Manage alert preferences on your profile. "Israeli blockchain firm develops 'fire prevention' tech to thwart FTX-style fraud". www.timesofisrael.com. Retrieved 2025-06-09. {{cite web}}: |first= has generic name (help)
  16. ^ Bambysheva, Nina. "Ethereum Scaling Company StarkWare Quadruples Valuation To $8 Billion Amid Bear Market". Forbes. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  17. ^ "Israel's Ethereum scaling tool Starknet Prover will be made open source | The Jerusalem Post". The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. 2023-02-05. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  18. ^ "עוד יוניקורן ישראלי נולד: סטארקוויר מגייסת 50 מיליון דולר לפי שווי של 2 מיליארד | כלכליסט". calcalist (in Hebrew). 2021-11-16. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  19. ^ שטרקמן, רותם; בוקסנבוים, נעם (13 April 2018). "אלי בן ששון, פרופ' בטכניון, יצר מטבע דיגיטלי וחושב שהביטקוין גאוני".
  20. ^ "Technion sues own lecturer, claims intellectual property infringement | The Jerusalem Post". The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. 2019-04-23. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  21. ^ Dobrovitsky, Lital (2019-04-22). "Technion Suing Senior Professor for 50% of His Company Stake". CTECH - www.calcalistech.com. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
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