Silex Insight, a provider of security IP cores, and Medium Inc., a Korean provider of blockchain and enterprise security solutions, today announced they’ve joined forces to deliver a blockchain platform with extremely high performance that can process more than 1 million signature verifications per second.
Medium’s blockchain platform is made possible via Silex Insight’s hardware acceleration platform that uses public-key cryptography engines to offload Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) cryptographic operations for secp256k1 (used in Bitcoin) using Xilinx Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards.
The idea was to have a scalable plug-and-play solution for private and public clouds wherever needed.
Generally, blockchain platforms make use of DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) for secure and transparent transactions. However, due to their resource-intensive and decentralized nature, there are significant challenges in terms of scalability for real-world applications.
Medium wanted to bridge this gap with cutting-edge technology delivered via a single blockchain platform that uses hardware acceleration capable of providing public, permissioned, and private blockchains along with a decentralized exchange.
Therefore, Medium Inc. took a strategic decision to team up with Silex Insight, in order to reach their goal of being able to process smart contracts and more than 1 million signature verifications per second.
“Silex Insight is an ideal partner with a rich history within embedded security and proven technology for massive public key operations. As a matter of fact, scalability is no longer a bottleneck and we are now capable of massive adaptation and tremendous throughput, without compromising security.”
– TG Han, SVP of Sales and Marketing at Medium Inc.
Silex Insight and Medium Inc. are consolidating their partnership and are looking to build future solutions to continually boost performance and further reduce power consumption.
“Blockchain transactions have the potential to revolutionize the world economy, and we are excited to deliver security solutions according to the market needs. With Medium Inc. it was not about connecting the cryptographic standard to their blockchain requirement, it was about setting a new performance benchmark on minimum power consumption. With the same setup as Medium Inc. using the NIST curve (sepc256r1) instead, it is possible to further increase the ECDSA signature verifications to 2 million per second.”
– Pieter Willems, Director Sales and Marketing Security Products at Silex