Interoperability platform Wormhole is set to harness the power of AMD’s enterprise-grade FPGA hardware accelerator chips to scale cross-chain communication. This move aims to bolster the platform’s capacity for secure cross-chain messages using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs).
As Wormhole serves as a bridge connecting over 30 blockchains, integrating zero-knowledge proofs into its platform has become essential. The project is currently developing “light client” implementations to enable secure transfers across different chains, leveraging ZKPs to establish secure “corridors” between blockchains for messaging.
However, generating and verifying proofs across networks requires significant compute power, which is where AMD’s chips come in. These FPGA chips, commonly used for compute-intensive tasks like training machine learning models, will be optimised for Wormhole’s platform.
Dan Reecer, co-founder and chief operating officer at Wormhole Foundation, highlighted AMD’s crucial role in providing enterprise-grade FPGA and GPU hardware and offering deep hardware expertise to Wormhole ZK engineers, ensuring efficiency and speed.
Beyond hardware provision, AMD will also share its expertise in hardware acceleration to enhance the scalability of applications developed within the Wormhole ecosystem.
In the coming months, organisations contributing to Wormhole will begin deploying mainnet implementations of various zero-knowledge (ZK) light clients. Recently, Wormhole announced a collaboration with Succinct Labs to improve the development and performance of an Ethereum-based ZK light client.
Wormhole’s objective is to establish secure communication channels across major blockchains such as Ethereum, Near, Solana, Aptos, Sui, and Cosmos. Scaling proof generation and verification in the light clients will be supported by AMD devices.
Highlighting the critical importance of product security, Wormhole’s core contributors stress the significance of ZK-based light clients in enhancing security and decentralisation. This emphasis stems from a security breach in February 2022, where a flaw in signature verification on the Wormhole network led to the theft of over $320 million in ETH, although the compromised funds were eventually recovered.
