Web3 Leader Spotlight: Louis Guthmann
This week, we had the opportunity to chat with Louis Guthmann, Ecosystem Lead at StarkWare, a trailblazer in developing scaling and privacy solutions for blockchains through the innovative ZK-STARK technology. By significantly enhancing throughput and reducing transaction costs, StarkWare has helped redefine blockchain.
To date, StarkWare’s products have enabled the minting and trading of over 122 million NFTs, including some of the most popular collections such as CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Art Blocks.
Could you share what inspired you to join the blockchain industry, and how your path eventually lead you to become the ecosystem lead at StarkWare?
I joined crypto early 2016, buying $10 of bitcoin just to track the price roughly around the same time The DAO hack happened.
I stayed interested in blockchain tech despite all its drama, and eventually I decided to read the bitcoin paper, and that’s when I properly fell in love with the space and decided to deep dive into all-things crypto. Eventually I stumbled into ZCash and decided to go into ZK-Proofs.
Fast-forward 1 year, I started a meetup about ZKPs in Tel Aviv, London, Paris and others, worked with the Ethereum Foundation and then eventually in mid-2019, StarkWare reached out and hired me.
Being the most external facing person in the company and the biggest degen, I moved on to work directly with the devs building on our stack.
What is STARK technology? How do you see STARK-based solutions shaping the ecosystem in the years to come?
Starks are a new tool coming from an area of computer science called Cryptography and more precisely Zero Knowledge Proof. They can be understood as a compression algorithm for computation just like Zip is a compression algorithm for data.
StarkWare are becoming the number one solution used by the industry. Between all the Validity Rollups and the ZK Coprocessors, all solutions require speed which is where STARKs shine. Additionally, I am seeing a lot of advanced research being conducted in the space. What we see today has not reached any plateau. We should expect performance improvements at the pure software level up to 1000x.
What advice do you have for budding developers looking to make an impact in the blockchain space?
Be creative, have fun and think what was not possible before is now, build toys! And as you are doing it, you should communicate early and often on Twitter.
CryptoTwitter is a serious place which could change your life if you manage to get visibility. To get visibility is also a lot easier than it seems. If you write interesting things, just DM your favourite influencers relevant to the topic. They will happily retweet.
Security is paramount for blockchain adoption. Can you tell us how StarkWare is solving this?
Security is a very wide topic. It can apply to the core infra, to dev tooling, to dApps. Starknet is built on the most verified tech stack in the ZK space. Major advancements and solutions like Account Abstraction have reduced the dApp attack vector by removing the infinite approval that exists in all crypto.
