In this episode of Blocklayer Podcast, Kenzi Takahashi, Sachi Shiokava, and Diksha Desai sit down with Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-Founder and President of StarkWare, to unpack the story behind one of the most important breakthroughs in blockchain scaling: zero-knowledge proofs.

Eli shares how a career in core theory and academia ultimately led him into Web3 — from earning his Ph.D. under Avi Wigderson to postdoctoral work at MIT and Harvard University. With deep roots in probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs), Eli explains the moment it clicked: at a 2013 Bitcoin conference, he realized these ideas could compress verification and directly attack blockchain’s scalability limits.

We dive into how StarkWare’s tech compresses computation into proofs, what it takes to onboard the next billion users without comp ...