About

A silicon IP company that builds hardware

Node Labs Inc is a Canadian fabless semiconductor company designing silicon IP for cryptographic acceleration, based in Vancouver, BC.

Node Labs grew out of a decade of work in the Bitcoin ecosystem, where we saw firsthand that scaling blockchain infrastructure requires purpose-built hardware — not just better software.

Our long-term play is expertise: to be the team that knows how to make elliptic-curve arithmetic fast, small, and cool-running in silicon, and to license that IP. The hardware we build along the way — the Blitz accelerator card — exists to prove the cores in the field and fund the road to tape-out.

Team

Peter Rizun, Ph.D., P.Eng.

Founder

Peter is a physicist and professional engineer who has spent a decade in the cryptocurrency space building things and measuring them — the same pattern Node Labs runs on. Selected work:

2014 — sigsafe, a prototype NFC key tag that signed Bitcoin transactions across an air gap — purpose-built signature hardware, a decade before Blitz.
2015 — “A Transaction Fee Market Exists Without a Block Size Limit”, presented at Scaling Bitcoin Montreal.
2015 — co-founded Ledger, the first peer-reviewed academic journal for cryptocurrency research, and served as its managing editor.
2016 — Xtreme Thinblocks: efficient block propagation, proven with measurements over 9,000 real-network blocks — Bitcoin Core’s Compact Blocks followed.
2017 — the Gigablock Testnet: mined the first 1 GB blocks and measured where full nodes actually bottleneck, presented at Scaling Bitcoin Stanford.
2025 — “Hardware Acceleration” at BCH Bliss, Ljubljana — the work that became Node Labs.

The discipline of shipping hardware people depend on comes from OSENSA Innovations, the precision fiber-optic sensing company he co-owns and has led technically from its early days — instruments deployed at scale in critical industrial systems, with everything that entails: EMC and safety certification, reliability engineering, real manufacturing.

Peter works with a small team across electronics hardware engineering, FPGA and RTL design, and the road from FPGA validation to ASIC tape-out — their names join this page as roles are formalized.

Our relationship with Nexa

Node Labs works closely with the Nexa cryptocurrency project, and we want that relationship on the table rather than in the fine print: our founder is one of Nexa's designers — the partnership has its own page.

Building in Canada

Canada is a deliberate choice of home for this work, and we intend the work to leave the country stronger for it — starting with the students.

Node Labs Inc. is incorporated in Canada as a Canadian-controlled private corporation (CCPC).

Student projects, funded

Node Labs funded a UBC Engineering Physics capstone project to build an FPGA elliptic-curve point multiplier — the exploratory work that led to Blitz. The project won the Roy Nodwell Award for the top capstone project.

Capability that stays

The fabless model means the valuable part — the IP — is designed, owned, and retained in Canada and licensed to the world. And we plan to run our first tape-out through the open-source OpenROAD flow and publish what we learn — an open, low-cost path from RTL to silicon that any small Canadian team could follow.