Belfort launches Velox, the world’s fastest TFHE Accelerator

San Francisco / Leuven – March 5, 2026 – Belfort today announced Velox, the latest iteration of its encrypted compute accelerator. Velox runs on the AMD Alveo V80 FPGAs and achieves more than 3x performance improvement over its previous generation. Velox is the fastest known acceleration for TFHE workloads and will be available both in the cloud and on-premises.

Founded as a spin-off from KU Leuven, Belfort enables computation on encrypted data, helping organizations unlock the value of sensitive data without compromising privacy.

Encrypted Compute

As AI systems become more powerful and increasingly integrated into sensitive workflows, protecting the underlying data becomes critical. Sensitive information such as patient records, financial transactions, and proprietary business intelligence must remain secure.

Traditional approaches require decrypting data before processing, exposing sensitive information to infrastructure and system operators.

Encrypted compute changes that. By enabling AI inference and computation on fully encrypted inputs, organizations can process sensitive data while ensuring it is never exposed, even to the infrastructure running the model. The result is AI that is not only powerful, but provably private.

Introducing Velox

For nearly a decade, the team has focused on bringing encrypted compute from research into production systems. Velox represents a major step forward.

The platform upgrades Belfort’s previous FPT system running on AMD Alveo U55C FPGAs to the next-generation Alveo V80, unlocking significant performance gains.

“We implemented several hardware and mathematical optimizations in our accelerator, resulting in a lean architecture that is both flexible and highly performant. The initial release of Velox runs at 300 MHz, with further clock improvements planned in future iterations.”

Furkan Turan, Belfort Co-Founder & Head of Engineering

Velox also launches with native multi-FPGA support, transparently partitioning and distributing encrypted workloads across all available accelerators, with zero user-side orchestration. This capability is not currently available on other encrypted compute platforms.

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Throughput (PBS/s) Benchmarks:

Designed for real-world use

Alongside hardware improvements, Belfort has significantly expanded its software integration layer.

Velox integrates with widely used fully homomorphic encryption frameworks, including Google HEIR and TFHE-rs, allowing developers to run encrypted workloads using familiar tooling.

“Our goal is to make encrypted compute accessible. Customers can request access and be running workloads on our hardware within minutes. A dual-Velox system can sustain over 260 confidential ERC-20 token transfers per second, demonstrating the performance required for real-world applications.”

Michiel Van Beirendonck, Belfort Co-Founder & CTO

What this enables

Encrypted compute allows organizations to process sensitive data without ever exposing it, enabling entirely new privacy-preserving applications.

2x faster encrypted fraud detection:

In collaboration with SWIFT, Belfort developed a fraud detection workflow that checks encrypted bank transactions against sanction lists. With Velox, a single check takes 7.63 seconds on one FPGA, roughly 2x faster than previous implementations, bringing encrypted fraud detection closer to practical deployment.

20x faster confidential stablecoin payments:

Velox enables confidential blockchain transactions to be validated while the transaction details remain encrypted. This makes it possible to process stablecoin payments on public infrastructure without revealing transaction amounts or counterparties, a major unlock for business transactions.

8.5x faster AES transciphering:

Velox also delivers 8.5x faster conversion of data protected with standard encryption, such as AES, into fully homomorphic encryption, making it practical to process sensitive data in the cloud while it remains encrypted. In practice, this means organizations can deploy this technology without changing existing client-side encryption.

Together, these advances make it increasingly feasible to use sensitive data without ever revealing it, unlocking new possibilities across finance and other data-sensitive industries.

(Early) Access

Velox will be available both in the cloud and as an on-premise deployment.

Organizations interested in testing encrypted compute workloads can request early access to the Velox platform.

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About Belfort

At Belfort, we believe that in an AI-first world, trust is all you need and the future of computing is encrypted. Belfort enables that vision by accelerating encrypted compute to make it practical at scale, ensuring that sensitive data can be processed without ever being decrypted. A spin-off from KU Leuven’s world-renowned COSIC lab, Belfort combines breakthroughs in hardware and algorithms to build the next layer of secure computing. The company has offices in San Francisco, USA, and Leuven, Belgium. https://belfortlabs.com.