The adoption of blockchain technology is on the rise, and most companies are looking into the technology in some way. As blockchain becomes more ubiquitous, all types of users will need the most efficient access to the capabilities of this technology.
One of the responses to this has been the development of blockchain chips as energy efficiency accelerators. On February 23, Chain Reaction, a Tel Aviv-based blockchain chip startup, announced that it had raised $70 million to expand its engineering team to develop its next chip.
Alon Webman, co-founder and CEO of Chain Reaction, said the new chip will be a “fully homomorphic encryption” chip that allows the user to work with data while the chip is encrypted.
“Today, if you have data (that) is encrypted in the cloud and to do any data operation or data analysis, do AI, you have to decrypt the data.”
He went on to say that major industries that could use cloud services, such as defense and governments, are currently unable to do so due to security concerns.
“The moment the data is decrypted, a malicious user can attack it to read it, steal it, or even change it.”
An encryption chip, which allows access to the encrypted data, could help with this. Webman says that Chain Reaction aims to launch that chip by the end of 2024.
Related: Modular blockchains could be the next hot crypto market trend in 2023
According to Webman, Chain Reaction intends to begin mass production of its current Electrum blockchain chip in the first quarter of 2023. The chip is designed to support fast and efficient hashing. It can also be used in cryptocurrency mining.
Last year, in February 2022, software developer Intel also released a blockchain chip designed by Nvidia Corp to speed up power-hungry blockchain tasks that require large amounts of computing power.
Nvidia also has a separate chip for the specific purpose of mining Ethereum.
