Blockchain Acceleration Using FPGAs - Elliptic curves, zk-SNARKs, and VDFs

## Speaker

Ben Devlin

## Summary

This talk presents the results of a 10 month Zcash foundation grant into FPGA acceleration of various parts of Zcash’s blockchain. This project resulted in three main deliverables (all open source). First, we developed high performance hashing engines, used for verifying PoW equihash solutions. Second we developed elliptic curve engines and targeted the secp256k1 curve which is used for verifying transparent transactions, and the bls12-381 curve which is used in constructing zk-SNARK proofs. Finally, on top of these engines, we developed a bls12-381 coprocessor which has an instruction set capable of accelerating optimal ate pairing operations, the main workload in zk-SNARKs.

I will also go over VDFs and how they can be accelerated on FPGAs, as well as presenting a summary of recent results from other research groups.

Github for the code:

https://github.com/bsdevlin/zcash-fpga

## Agenda

15:00~ 15:30 Networking
15:30~ 16:30 Talk