Nil Foundation and semiconductor startup Fabric Cryptography have announced a strategic alliance to ensure their products are compatible and accelerate the deployment of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. ZK proofs are a type of cryptographic process that allow one party to prove to another that something is true without revealing any information about the statement itself. They are seen as a major advancement in blockchains due to their privacy-preserving attributes.
The two organizations said in a press release, “The strategic alliance between Fabric and Nil Foundation paves the way for almost unlimited, cost-effective, and high-speed ZKP-dedicated computing power readily available, making them a viable tool for every digital transaction, cloud service, and privacy-sensitive application.” Nil Foundation launched in 2018 as a research collective before becoming a traditional startup. In January, it raised $22 million to build a marketplace for ZK proofs and developed a zero-knowledge Low-Level Virtual Machine (zkLLVM) to streamline workloads for ZK developers.
Fabric Cryptography, based in Silicon Valley, is developing a general-purpose processor for “next-gen cryptography,” including ZK proofs, called the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU). The virtual machine and processing unit have been made compatible with each other, such that the zkLLVM software will see “major performance advantages” when running on Fabric’s hardware.