An Improved Hardware Architecture of Ethereum Blockchain Hashing System

Blockchain technology has become extremely popular, especially in recent years. It has been successfully applied in the field of cryptocurrencies. Prominent is Ethereum, the most popular and highly valued cryptocurrency on the market. It is used in many aspects of society, including healthcare, education, and the economy. Ethereum mining is the process of adding a block of transactions to the Ethereum Blockchain. This process generates a new block, which processes, stores, and secures the transaction information created by the user’s transaction processes. Ethash is Ethereum’s current mining algorithm. The primary cryptographic hash functions of Ethash are Keccak512 and Keccak256. This paper proposes a 2-stages pipelined architecture with high throughput and high efficiency for the Keccak hash function. Then we applied this architecture to implement the Ethash algorithm on hardware. This design will be implemented on Xilinx Virtex-7 VC707 FPGA. The results of our proposed Keccak architecture achieve a Frequency of 816.742 MHz, Throughput and Efficiency reach 35.545 Gbps and 36.196 Mbps/Slices, respectively. The Hashrate of the proposed system achieves 414.14 KH/s with an operating Frequency of 66.263 MHz.