Technology
Purpose-built silicon for cryptography's hardest math
General-purpose processors hit a wall on cryptographic workloads. We design the circuits that don't.
Why custom hardware
Cryptographic workloads keep growing — signature verification, zero-knowledge proofs. CPUs run out of throughput; GPUs improve it but carry the overhead of generality: power-hungry, physically large, and not shaped like the math.
Purpose-built silicon eliminates that overhead, and the advantage scales in both directions — ultra-low-power operation at the edge, or maximum throughput in the data center.
This already happened once
Cryptocurrency has already run the experiment. Bitcoin mining is one cryptographic operation — SHA-256 — with an open market incentive attached, and fifteen years of competition moved it from Satoshi's CPU through GPUs to purpose-built ASICs:
| Hardware | Hashes per joule | Versus 2009 CPU |
|---|---|---|
| CPU · 2009 | 100 K | the starting point |
| first GPUs | 1.2 M | 12× the 2009 CPU |
| first ASICs | 500 M | 5,000× the 2009 CPU |
| ASICs · 2024 | 60 B | 600,000× the 2009 CPU |
Fig. 5 A ∼600,000× efficiency improvement in fifteen years. Our founder's 2024 Sydney talk walks through the numbers, drawn from the public mining-hardware record.
Over those same fifteen years, the network's transaction capacity did not move: roughly seven transactions per second then, roughly seven now. Had validation improved with mining, Bitcoin would process millions of transactions per second today. The force that produced a 600,000× improvement was real — it was simply pointed at a hash puzzle that exercises none of the machinery that validates transactions, so node capacity stayed decoupled from it.
We take the same trajectory — purpose-built silicon, relentlessly optimized for a single operation — and point it at the math the network actually depends on: signature verification.
The engine that does it is the K1; the open platform it drops into — and what we open-source — is on the Open Source page.