In their paper, “Experimental evaluation of digitally-verifiable photonic computing for blockchain and cryptocurrency,” Professors Shanhui Fan, David Miller, and Olav Solgaard detail their new approach called LightHash, which uses a photonic integrated circuit to create a photonic blockchain. With further development, they predict that this approach, if implemented on a large scale, could produce a roughly ten-fold improvement in energy use compared to the best modern digital electronic processors. Professor David A.B. Miller co-led the Stanford University research team with Professor Shanhui Fan and Professor Olav Solgaard.

Paper abstract: As blockchain technology and cryptocurrency become increasingly mainstream, photonic computing has emerged as an efficient hardware platform that reduces ever-increasing energy costs required to verify transactions in decentralized cryptonetworks. To reduce sensitivity of these verifications to photonic hardware error, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a cryptographic scheme, LightHash, that implements robust, low-bit precision matrix multiplication in programmable silicon photonic networks. We demonstrate an error mitigation scheme to reduce error by averaging computation across circuits, and simulate energy-efficiency-error trade-offs for large circuit sizes. We conclude that our error-resistant and efficient hardware solution can potentially generate a new market for decentralized photonic blockchain.

Excerpted from EurekaAlert! AAAS, "Light-based computing scheme reduces power needed to mine cryptocurrencies.”