Editor’s Note: This article was inspired by themes discussed by our CEO Mark Davis during presentations at Berlin Ethereum Day and BREW during Berlin Blockchain Week 2026. These discussions explored open-source silicon, hardware transparency, and the challenge of extending Web3’s trustless principles beyond software and into the hardware stack.
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Ethereum and other blockchain systems are often celebrated for being decentralized, permissionless, trustless, secure, and open source. These qualities have become fundamental to how the Web3 community thinks about technology and governance. We routinely debate protocol transparency, cryptographic assumptions, decentralization tradeoffs, and open-source development practices.
Yet there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Web3. Blockchain systems are built on principles of openness, transparency, and verifiability, but the hardware beneath them often remains a black box. Wallets, secure elements, and semiconductor supply chains are typically hidden from public scrutiny, even though modern cryptography is founded on the idea that security should not depend on secrecy. If users are expected to verify software rather than trust it, should the same standard not apply to hardware?
1. Hardware: The Missing Layer in the Trust Stack
The blockchain industry has spent more than a decade building systems designed to resist censorship and capture while remaining open, private, and secure. At the application, protocol, and network layers, enormous progress has been made. Public blockchains allow anyone to inspect source code, verify transactions, and participate without permission.
Yet a significant gap remains. Most attention continues to focus on optimizing the upper layers of the blockchain stack, while far less attention is given to the foundational client-side layers beneath them. Every blockchain transaction ultimately depends on physical hardware to generate keys, authorize actions, and protect sensitive information. End-user devices are typically built on repurposed hardware platforms, semiconductors, and process technologies that were never designed for secure wallet applications. This is especially visible in wallet infrastructure: despite major advances in self-custody software, the hardware foundations beneath many wallets remain difficult for users to inspect, understand, or verify.
The result is an uncomfortable paradox. In software, vulnerabilities are disclosed, analyzed, and patched through community engagement. In secure hardware, critical information often remains hidden behind NDAs and proprietary processes. Users are frequently asked to trust vendors rather than verify systems for themselves. If the hardware foundation remains opaque, can self-custody ever be truly trustless?
2. Why Open-Source Silicon Is Different
As awareness of these issues has grown, so has interest in open-source silicon. Unfortunately, the term is often misunderstood. Many people assume that open-source silicon simply means publishing RTL on GitHub. While that is an important step, it represents only a small part of the journey from design to finished chip.
Unlike software, silicon does not move directly from source code to a finished product. Most chips begin as RTL (Register Transfer Level) code, which describes hardware behavior. That RTL is synthesized into a gate-level netlist, integrated with memory blocks and other intellectual property, transformed into a physical layout, and ultimately converted into the masks used for fabrication. The design then passes through manufacturing, packaging, and testing before reaching users. Each stage relies on specialized tools, design libraries, process technologies, and supply-chain partners, creating a long chain of transformations between the original source and the finished device.
This complexity creates a challenge that does not exist in software. Publishing source materials may improve transparency, but it does not automatically establish trust. Software can often be independently compiled and verified against the binaries being executed. Hardware offers no such straightforward path. Users ultimately receive a small black package with no obvious connection to its original design, making it difficult to determine whether the manufactured device truly corresponds to the published source. Open-source silicon is therefore not merely a licensing question — it is fundamentally a verification challenge.
3. From Open Source to Verifiable Hardware
If the challenge is ensuring that manufactured hardware corresponds to its intended design, how can users verify it?
To address this challenge, researchers and developers are exploring approaches such as InfraRed In-Situ (IRIS) imaging, open tooling, reproducible design flows, and intermediate verification checkpoints. While these methods remain imperfect and are still evolving, they offer practical ways to make hardware less of a black box.
Yet the challenge is not merely technical. Complete transparency is difficult to reconcile with the realities of modern semiconductor manufacturing. Physical layouts reveal information about manufacturing processes, design rules, and electrical characteristics that semiconductor foundries invest billions of dollars to develop. As a result, the future of verifiable hardware may depend not on making every aspect of the design process public, but on developing practical verification methods that can coexist with proprietary manufacturing technologies.
Despite these challenges, meaningful progress is underway. Open-source roots of trust such as Pavona, open-source RISC-V cores including Ibex and VexRiscv, and initiatives such as Tropic Square, Flashbots’ TEE Collective, and Vensa are each tackling different aspects of hardware trust. At the same time, rising semiconductor development costs are driving interest in “community chips” — shared silicon platforms that support commercial products, open-source development, and ecosystem experimentation through a single tapeout. Together, these efforts are expanding the range of tools and approaches available for building more transparent and accountable hardware systems.
4. Daric: Putting Open-Source Silicon into Practice
The ideas discussed throughout this article are not merely theoretical. They are already being explored through real-world hardware projects, including Daric (internal codename of CrossBar Chip 1), CrossBar’s Secure Processing Unit (SPU), which was developed to push open-source principles deeper into the hardware stack.
Through collaboration with renowned hardware hacker and open-source hardware advocate Andrew “bunnie” Huang and the BaoChip 1x effort — an open-source silicon initiative focused on transparent, inspectable, and high-assurance hardware — Daric incorporated an open-source RISC-V core and made RTL available wherever third-party IP constraints permit. This created something unusual in the secure-silicon industry: a chip that could be examined not only as a finished product, but also through portions of the design process that produced it.
Daric has also become a platform for exploring one of the industry’s most difficult challenges: hardware verification. Through its use in bunnie’s IRIS (InfraRed In-Situ) research, the project helped explore new ways to establish a relationship between published designs and manufactured hardware. IRIS leverages the partial transparency of silicon to infrared light, allowing certain packaged chips to be inspected without destructive analysis. By comparing observed structures against published designs, the technique can provide physical evidence that key portions of a chip correspond to their intended implementation. While IRIS cannot provide complete assurance, it offers a practical way to place meaningful bounds on what might otherwise remain hidden inside a hardware black box.
Daric therefore illustrates both the promise and the limitations of today’s open-source silicon movement: real, inspectable progress, alongside a frank acknowledgment of how much verification work still lies ahead.
5. Conclusion
The blockchain industry has spent years building trustless software systems. The next challenge is extending those principles to the hardware they depend on. Open-source silicon is about more than publishing design files. It is about extending the principles of transparency and accountability beyond software and into the hardware that underpins digital trust.
While significant challenges remain, one principle is becoming increasingly clear: trust should come from transparency rather than obscurity. If decentralization is to extend all the way down the technology stack, hardware can no longer remain a blind spot.
The future of open-source silicon will be defined not only by what is shared, but by what can be verified.
— The CrossBar Team