Wormhole Foundation Awards Contributor Grant to Supranational for Wormhole ZK Hardware Acceleration

Wormhole Foundation has awarded a Contributor Grant to Supranational focused on zero-knowledge hardware acceleration in the Wormhole ZK interoperability system. Wormhole ZK is being built by developers to minimize trust in the Wormhole platform, improve cross-chain composability, and increase network security. You can read more about the vision of Wormhole ZK in the recently announced ZK roadmap.

Meet Supranational

Supranational designs and develops hardware-accelerated cryptography for verifiable and confidential computing. The team has decades of experience in algorithmic optimization, and their work spans across CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC computing platforms. In particular, the team is focused on developing open source, permissively-licensed, and production-grade cryptographic libraries. One of the most well-known examples of these libraries is blst, a high-performance and high-assurance implementation of BLS signatures. This library is currently used by blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Optimism, Aptos, Sui, and more. Blockchain protocols leverage this library to help them securely scale their consensus protocols and the library currently helps to secure over $100B of assets.

In addition to their work on the cryptography powering consensus and asset management, Supranational also develops hardware acceleration for emerging cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). For example, their open source library, sppark, is used to accelerate the core primitives of SNARKs and STARKs with high-performance GPU implementations. This library is currently used by the Filecoin protocol and helps to generate over 75% of the ZKPs in the blockchain space. In addition to Filecoin, the library is also used by other leading verifiable and privacy preserving protocols such as Aleo, Risc0, and more.

Finally, in addition to their work on open source libraries, Supranational also offers services for low-cost ZK proof generation as well as custom ASIC design and development. One such ASIC developed by Supranational is currently in production use  on the Chia network. For more information about the work of Supranational, visit https://www.supranational.net/ or e-mail [email protected].

How are Wormhole contributors and Supranational working together?

Supranational and Wormhole contributors are working together to improve the cost and security of the Wormhole protocol through hardware acceleration of ZKPs. Wormhole ZK is a collaborative effort designed by the community to minimize trust in the Wormhole platform, improve cross-chain composability, and increase network security. By leveraging hardware acceleration, the performance and cost can be reduced for this increased usability and security. 

In particular, Supranational and Wormhole will be jointly working to reduce the time and cost of creating ‘light-client’ proofs, a key primitive for cross-chain interaction. Wormhole ZK is implementing light clients on Ethereum, Sui, Aptos, Near, and Cosmos, which enable trustless transfers between blockchains. Supranational will leverage their experience in CPU and GPU acceleration to reduce the latency of this proof generation, enabling improved time-to-settlement. While the collaboration is targeted at the Wormhole protocol, all developments will be open sourced, with a goal of working toward ‘real-time’ proof generation for the industry at large. Furthermore, acceleration libraries developed by Supranational will work across both AMD and Nvidia GPUs (see Wormhole and AMD Hardware Partnership) in order to make the improved performance as widely usable as possible. To follow along with this collaboration, make sure to follow the Wormhole repositories on GitHub.

About Supranational

Supranational designs and develops hardware accelerated cryptography for verifiable and confidential computing. The team has decades of experience in algorithmic optimization across CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC platforms. Accelerated cryptography developed by Supranational is currently in production in blockchain networks such as Ethereum, Optimism, Filecoin, Aptos, Sui, Chia, and more. For more information, visit https://www.supranational.net/ or e-mail [email protected].

About Wormhole Foundation

The Wormhole Foundation is the steward of Wormhole, the leading interoperability platform powering multichain applications and bridges. Our mission is to empower passionate people in the research and development of blockchain interoperability technologies. Through grants, research, and ecosystem programs, we support teams in building secure, open-source, and decentralized products within the Wormhole ecosystem.

Stay updated with our mission by following us on Twitter or contact us at [email protected].