THE 5 LEVELS OF SECURE HARDWARE

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

This framework by Paradigm proposes five evolutionary levels of secure hardware development. The industry is currently at level 3, which offers strong developer experience and GPU support for applications like private ML inference but still relies on a proprietary manufacturing process. The progression ranges from basic oracle/bridge applications in Level 1 to Level 5's vision of heterogeneous open, secure hardware networks capable of handling sensitive global-scale operations like voting systems. Current tech enables practical applications with hardware attestation, but Level 5 requires significant advances in open manufacturing processes and hardware interconnectivity, with tradeoffs between security, performance, and developer experience.