Cross-chain app Wormhole continues zero-knowledge push with AMD collab

AMD, one of the world’s biggest semiconductor makers, is providing Wormhole with hardware and advice as the interoperability app seeks to grow its zero-knowledge infrastructure.

Wormhole announced the partnership Monday in a blog post. It previously said the AMD hardware accelerators would be sourced for Wormhole contributors, and Wormhole will develop “light-client” integrations that run 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 fundraise.

Transactions on Wormhole are approved by a mutisig where 13 of 19 signers must agree on the contents of a message before it can be sent. In a Jan. 31 blog post, Wormhole said it hoped to decentralize its verification layer with zk technology.

Zk proofs allow the contents of a message to be proven true without revealing the message’s contents. 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 highly energy intensive.

In a blog post, AMD director of product Hamid Salehi said the firm’s FPGA semiconductors could help Wormhole scale its zero-knowledge infrastructure. It would do so through parallelization, whereby computing processes are carried out simultaneously instead of one by one.

Omer Shlomovits, founder of the 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 scaling zk applications cost effectively.

“AMD [is] at the forefront of [zk] adoption in the category of hardware providers, so I am sure they will contribute immensely to [Wormhole],” Shlomovits added.

AMD is among the ten largest chip companies, boasting roughly $265 billion in market capitalization. Its stock price has more than doubled in the past year, buoyed lately by its push into AI.