Who Is Eli Ben-Sasson? The StarkWare CEO Behind STARKs

Eli Ben-Sasson is the co-founder and CEO of StarkWare, the proof company he leads, and the 4% yearly Bitcoin issuance ceiling he proposed would allow 4.9 times the coins the network's schedule creates each year. He co-invented the proofs called STARKs that Starknet runs on and co-wrote Zerocash, the design Zcash grew from.

He floated it on X at 10:04 UTC on 7 July 2026, writing that a 21 million cap "doesn't make sense" because keys get lost over time. Bitcoin's schedule pays 3.125 BTC a block. At the protocol's target of 144 blocks a day, that comes to 164,250 BTC a year, or 0.82% of the 20.09 million BTC issued by 4 October 2026.

Eli Ben-Sasson at a Glance

Who Is Eli Ben-Sasson?

Eli Ben-Sasson is the StarkWare CEO, the title StarkWare's own blog gave him in its 26 August 2026 post on quantum-safe Bitcoin.

He earned his PhD at Hebrew University in 2001, according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project. His Technion faculty page still describes him as a professor whose focus is computational complexity. "I left my calm career in academia to go after this vision," he wrote in a June 2024 post on StarkWare's blog, after arguing that crypto "can deliver integrity to money".

Phemex's December 2025 write-up of Phemex co-hosting LONGITUDE in Abu Dhabi says he "discussed privacy" at the event.

What Did Eli Ben-Sasson Invent?

Zerocash came first. The Zerocash paper reached the Cryptology ePrint Archive on 19 May 2014 and appeared at that year's IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. It lists him first among seven authors, who appear in alphabetical order.

The design hides both ends of a payment and its amount, and the abstract puts each transaction under 1 kB with verification in under 6 milliseconds. Its privacy comes from zk-SNARKs, the compact proofs that our beginner-friendly explainer on zk-SNARKs walks through.

The Zerocash project site says the protocol "is being developed into a full-fledged digital currency, Zcash". Eli Ben-Sasson's X profile, read at 14:12 UTC on 4 October 2026, calls him a co-founder of both Zcash and StarkWare. If you've used Zcash's shielded addresses, you've used a descendant of that design, and Zcash's coin trades as ZEC.

STARKs followed four years later. The 2018 STARKs paper reached the same archive on 10 January 2018, co-written with Iddo Bentov, Yinon Horesh and Michael Riabzev. Its title promises computational integrity that's "scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure". In the paper, transparent means a system set up "with no reliance on any trusted party". The abstract adds that no system running in code had achieved transparency and exponentially faster verification at once, including the one Zcash used. So his second big paper took aim at the proof system inside the coin his first one led to.

Both papers build on what a zero-knowledge proof is, a way to prove a statement true without revealing the data behind it.

What Does StarkWare Do?

StarkWare turns those proofs into products. Its June 2024 Bitcoin post says Starknet is deployed as a Layer 2 on Ethereum, where StarkWare had deployed all its systems to that date. A rollup like Starknet bundles transactions off the main chain and posts a proof that the bundle's computation checks out.

Starknet is the public network, and its token is STRK. If you're new to it, Phemex's explainer on what Starknet is covers the token and its supply.

On 26 August 2026 StarkWare reported that the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction had reached mainnet. The method came from Avihu Levy, its general manager of applications, and it needed no change to Bitcoin's consensus rules. Our report on StarkWare's quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction sets out what it does and doesn't protect.

Why Is Eli Ben-Sasson in the News?

Starknet's STRK token ranked second on CoinMarketCap's 24-hour most-searched list at 12:35 UTC on 4 October 2026, and third when we read the list again at 14:17 UTC.

Starknet's official X account offered at 12:32 UTC on 2 October 2026 to cover bridge fees for "the first 100 BTC bridged to Starknet through strkbtc.io". Starknet's strkBTC launch post dates the token to 12 May 2026 and describes an ERC20 backed by BTC locked on the Bitcoin network. Its shielded mode hides selected balances and transfers from public view, and the post says that when a user shields strkBTC the viewing key goes to an independent third-party auditor.

His own byline ran in Fast Company on 1 October 2026 under the headline "We may be the last generation of mathematical heroes". In it he recounts OpenAI's August claim that its Astra model "had resolved or made substantial progress on 10 long-standing problems". Verifying proofs "has been the focus of my career", he writes, and machines that produce more mathematics move that work "from the margins to the center".

The essay reads as a mathematician's lament, and it doubles as a pitch for the proof verification StarkWare builds.

What Does Eli Ben-Sasson Want to Change About Bitcoin?

Eli Ben-Sasson's Bitcoin push for Starknet predates the supply post by two years. In his 4 June 2024 post on scaling Bitcoin he wrote that "Starknet will become the first network to settle simultaneously on Bitcoin and Ethereum". He tied the timing to OP_CAT, a Bitcoin upgrade that would have to activate first. StarkWare backed the plan with a $1 million fund for OP_CAT research. The post traces his proof-based scaling idea to a talk he gave at a Bitcoin conference in the spring of 2013.

The supply idea came on 7 July 2026. He wrote that "as time goes to infinity, all keys will be lost" and backed "a clear monetary policy with an absolute upper bound" on the number of coins. His suggestion was to fix a maximum issuance rate. "A good choice is 4% a year," he wrote, calling that "a reasonable upper bound on human population expansion". He closed by pointing to "the security problem, looming large on the horizon" without saying what it is.

Method: mempool.space showed the chain at block 969,858 at 14:13 UTC on 4 October 2026. The protocol pays 50 BTC a block and halves that every 210,000 blocks, so the schedule adds up to 20,093,309 BTC through that block. The reward has been 3.125 BTC since block 840,000, and the protocol targets one block every ten minutes, or 144 a day. With those three inputs you can rerun every figure below.

That gives 164,250 BTC a year (3.125 × 144 × 365), or 0.82% of supply. A 4% ceiling on the same base would allow 803,732 BTC in a year, 4.89 times the scheduled figure. Under the rules in force, the 21 million limit leaves about 906,700 BTC still to mine. A single year at his ceiling would equal 89% of that remainder.

Those figures measure his idea against the code in force, and the post names no mechanism or timetable for a change. Bitcoin's fixed schedule is the rule its holders price in, and a ceiling nearly five times the scheduled rate would rewrite it.

What It Means for Traders

Phemex lists no live STRK market. Its STRK perpetual and STRK spot pair both show as delisted in the Phemex product list we read at 12:20 UTC on 4 October 2026. If your interest in his work runs through STRK, Phemex has no route for it.

The listed markets that follow his work are Bitcoin and Zcash. Phemex's BTC perpetual closed at 84,714.4 USDT on the 3 October 2026 daily bar, and his 4% post takes aim at that coin's supply rule. If you trade BTC on the back of it, remember that Bitcoin's rules change only when node operators run new software.

ZEC is the other listed route, the coin of the network that grew out of Zerocash. Phemex's report on Zcash's shielded pool crossing $1 billion covers the privacy side of that market.

What to watch: OP_CAT. His 2024 post made Starknet's settlement on Bitcoin conditional on that upgrade, so any move to activate it bears directly on StarkWare's Bitcoin goal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the CEO of StarkWare in 2026?

Eli Ben-Sasson holds the role, and StarkWare's own blog named him CEO in its post on the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction.

Did Eli Ben-Sasson help create Zcash and ZEC?

He co-wrote the 2014 Zerocash paper that Zcash grew from, and the Zerocash site says that design improved on Zerocoin, an earlier protocol presented in 2013 that hid only a payment's origin.

What did Eli Ben-Sasson study for his PhD?

His 2001 Hebrew University dissertation was titled "Expansion in Proof Complexity" and had Avi Wigderson as its advisor, according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

What did the first STARKs paper actually demonstrate?

Its proof of concept let police prove that a presidential candidate's DNA profile does not appear in a forensic database without revealing anything else about the database.

What can traders learn from Eli Ben-Sasson's record?

Read a founder's posts apart from what his company ships, because strkBTC launched on a five-member federated bridge with a trustless design listed only on its roadmap.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.