Cross-chain App Wormhole Continues To Advance Zero-knowledge Technology Through Collaboration With AMD

AMD, one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, will provide hardware and consulting to Wormhole as the compatibility app looks to expand its zero-knowledge infrastructure. Wormhole announced the partnership on Monday in a blog post. It was previously reported that AMD hardware accelerators would be made available to Wormhole participants, and Wormhole would develop a “light client” integration that would run zk proofs with fewer resources.

Wormhole is a protocol for moving assets between over 30 different blockchains. Last fall, investors valued Wormhole at $2.5 billion after raising $225 million. Transactions in Wormhole are approved by requiring 13 of the 19 signatories to agree on the contents of the message before it is sent. In a blog post on January 31, Wormhole said it hopes to decentralize its verification layer using zk technology. Zk proofs allow the contents of a message to be proven true without revealing the message’s contents. However, zk proofs are very energy-intensive.

In a blog post, AMD product director Hamid SALEHI said the company’s FPGA semiconductors could help Wormhole scale its infrastructure with zk. This will be done through parallelization, in which computing processes are performed simultaneously rather than one after the other. Omer SHLOMOVITS, founder of hardware startup zk Ingonyama, said in a Telegram post that the FPGA accelerator cards being added to Wormhole — the U55C and U250 — are well suited for cost-effective scaling of zk applications.

Image: SiliconANGLE