Design exploration of an ASIC for Blockchain processing

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Blockchain is a emerging technology that uses a distributed, public ledger to keep track of transactions between various parties. Blockchain is disrupting industries such as supply chain management, asset tracking and healthcare record keeping. Blockchain offers a number of advantages over traditional systems, which use a central authority to keep track of all transactions (e.g., a bank for financial transactions). This central authority becomes a single point of failure for the entire system. If this central authority is hacked, details of the entire database could be leaked. In contrast, in a blockchain, records are stored by every computer that is part of the blockchain network. Thus any attempt to subvert these records would be immediately detected by the other users, making such activity nearly impossible. Blockchain processing is currently performed on general-purpose processors which were not designed for blockchain workloads. As a result, their performance for blockchain processing is sub-optimal. They also suffer from higher power consumption compared to a chip designed specifically for blockchain processing. The purpose of this collaboration is to address key initial concerns for building such a chip for blockchain processing. This project will develop a chip design that can provide state-of-the-art performance for blockchain workloads.