Hardware Accelerators for IOTA Cryptocurrency

Abstract

IOTA cryptocurrency is a distributed solution for secure messaging and micropayments between Internet-of Things devices. The authors introduced open source hardware accelerators for Curl hash function and proof-of-work computations to increase the processing rate of IOTA transactions. The structure and operation principle of both accelerators are described. Proposed accelerators have been implemented on FPGA and integrated into ARM-based System-on-Chip. The characteristics of the system have been evaluated. Compared to official software implementation the proposed hardware accelerators demonstrate x2100 speed up on the creation of IOTA transactions.