Venture capital firms Blockchain Capital and 1kx jointly invest $33 million in Fabric Cryptography's Series A round.
Fabric Cryptography, a community-driven deep tech engine, has announced the development of a revolutionary Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) custom silicon chip. This groundbreaking technology is poised to drastically improve the speed and cost of running advanced cryptographic workloads, as stated by the company itself.
The VPU combines the high performance of ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) with the flexibility of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), offering a hybrid design that executes cryptographic operations efficiently while adapting to various algorithmic needs.
Key advantages of the VPU include:
- High performance cryptographic processing: By leveraging ASIC-level speed, the VPU accelerates intensive cryptographic computations far beyond what traditional CPUs or GPUs can achieve alone.
- Flexibility and adaptability: Unlike fixed-function ASICs, the VPU’s architecture can handle diverse cryptographic algorithms and workflows, allowing for future upgrades or modifications without hardware replacement.
- Verifiable processing: The chip is designed to support verifiable computation, a crucial feature for applications that require trustworthy and auditable cryptographic proof outputs. This enhances data integrity and security assurance in decentralized or sensitive environments.
- Use cases in data security and cryptography: The technology fits well in scenarios requiring strong encryption, secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, or blockchain operations, where both speed and verifiability are paramount.
- Potential applications span: secure data storage and transmission, privacy-preserving computations, blockchain validation, cryptographic proof generation, and trusted execution environments that require both efficiency and auditability.
The VPU is the first custom silicon chip with an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography. It allows any cryptographic algorithm to be broken down into its mathematical building blocks.
The funds raised in the Series A round, co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, will be used to build the computing chips, develop software, and cryptographic algorithms. Fabric Cryptography, the crypto hardware startup, raised $33 million in this round.
Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs also participated in the fundraising. The company describes itself as a "community-driven deep tech engine solving the hardest problems in trust."
The announcement was made earlier in August, as mentioned in a blog post published by Michael Gao, the founder and CEO of Fabric Cryptography. In this post, Gao described the VPU as a solution to "age-old human problems" amidst a rapidly advancing society. The new chips are scheduled to go into production later in 2024.
[1] Source: Fabric Cryptography Blog Post, August 2022.
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