AMD, one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, is providing Wormhole with hardware and consulting as the interoperability app looks to grow its zero-knowledge infrastructure.
Worhole announced the collaboration in a blog post on Monday. It was previously said that the AMD hardware accelerators would be for Wormhole contributors, and that Wormhole will develop ‘light-client’ integrations that perform zk-proofs with fewer resources.
Wormhole is a protocol for moving assets across more than 30 different blockchains. Last fall, investors valued Wormhole at $2.5 billion in its eye-popping $225 million fundraising.
Transactions on Wormhole are approved by a mutisig where 13 of the 19 signatories must agree on the contents of a message before it can be sent. In a January 31 blog post, Wormhole said it hoped to decentralize its authentication layer with zk technology.
Zk-proofs can prove that the contents of a message are true, without revealing the contents of the message. In the context of Wormhole, this could take the form of verifying the amount of crypto moving from one wallet to another, without revealing details about the transaction itself.
However, ZK proofs are very energy intensive.
In a blog post, AMD product director Hamid Salehi said the company’s FPGA semiconductors can help Wormhole scale its zero-knowledge infrastructure. This would be done through parallelization, where computer processes are executed simultaneously instead of one at a time.
Omer Shlomovits, founder of zk hardware startup Ingonyama, said in a Telegram message that the FPGA accelerator cards being added to Wormhole – U55C and U250 – are well suited for cost-effectively scaling zk applications.
“AMD [is] at the forefront of [zk] adoption in the hardware vendor category, so I’m sure they will contribute greatly to that [Wormhole]” added Shlomovits.
AMD is one of the ten largest chip companies, with a market capitalization of approximately $265 billion. The share price has more than doubled in the past year, buoyed lately by the move to AI.