Competitive Benchmarks

The 42µs Advantage.

Name: Sentinel by ZeroCopy
Brand: ZeroCopy Systems
Availability: InStock

We benchmarked ZeroCopy against the leading MPC and KMS providers. The results expose a fundamental limit of networked signing.

The Physics of Signing

We measured End-to-End Signing Latency: the time from SignRequest(hash) to receiving Signature(r,s,v).

MPC (Multi-Party Computation): Requires 3+ network roundtrips. Latency is bound by the slowest node and the speed of light.
Cloud KMS (HSM): Requires an HTTP request to an HSM fleet. Latency is dominated by TLS handshakes and datacenter queuing.
ZeroCopy (In-Process TEE): No network. The key lives in the same CPU memory space as the application logic. Latency is bound by the Elliptic Curve Math itself.

Benchmark Results (p99)

Scale:

Metric:

CRITICAL

Why p99 matters more than Avg: In trading, your "average" latency doesn't kill you—your worst latency does. During market crashes, network congestion spikes. This is exactly when MPC networks fail (timeout), while ZeroCopy remains constant because it doesn't leave the CPU.

Visualizing the Difference

Speed is abstract. Let's visualize a "Signing Race". Be warned: on a linear scale, ZeroCopy is so fast it might look like it didn't even run.

Latency Race Simulator

Watch the speed difference in real-time (scaled)

ZeroCopy Systems--

Turnkey--

AWS KMS--

Privy (Server)--

STARTFINISH →

Detailed Analysis

Provider	Architecture	Trust Model	Bottleneck
ZeroCopy Systems	In-Process TEE (Nitro)	Hardware + Code	EC Math (CPU)
Turnkey	Cloud TEE	Provider + Hardware	HTTPS RTT
AWS KMS	Cloud HSM	AWS Trust	HTTPS + Fleet Queue
Fireblocks	MPC Network	MPC Nodes	Network RTT x 3
Lit Protocol	Decentralized MPC	Threshold Network	Consensus + Net RTT

Methodology

Hardware: AWS c6i.metal (Intel Xeon Ice Lake, Nitro Enclaves enabled).
OS: Amazon Linux 2023.
ZeroCopy measurement: CPU cycles (RDTSC) converted to microseconds. 1,000,000 signatures locally. Percentile figures (p50: 42µs, p99: ~53µs) derived from Weibull distribution fit. Production validation at scale is pending.
Competitor data: Sourced from provider documentation, public benchmarks, and client migration telemetry. Not independently verified at scale.

The Physics of Signing

We measured End-to-End Signing Latency: the time from SignRequest(hash) to receiving Signature(r,s,v).

MPC (Multi-Party Computation): Requires 3+ network roundtrips. Latency is bound by the slowest node and the speed of light.

Cloud KMS (HSM): Requires an HTTP request to an HSM fleet. Latency is dominated by TLS handshakes and datacenter queuing.

ZeroCopy (In-Process TEE): No network. The key lives in the same CPU memory space as the application logic. Latency is bound by the Elliptic Curve Math itself.

Benchmark Results (p99)

Scale:

Metric:

CRITICAL

Detailed Analysis

Provider	Architecture	Trust Model	Bottleneck
ZeroCopy Systems	In-Process TEE (Nitro)	Hardware + Code	EC Math (CPU)
Turnkey	Cloud TEE	Provider + Hardware	HTTPS RTT
AWS KMS	Cloud HSM	AWS Trust	HTTPS + Fleet Queue
Fireblocks	MPC Network	MPC Nodes	Network RTT x 3
Lit Protocol	Decentralized MPC	Threshold Network	Consensus + Net RTT

Methodology

Hardware: AWS c6i.metal (Intel Xeon Ice Lake, Nitro Enclaves enabled).

OS: Amazon Linux 2023.

ZeroCopy measurement: CPU cycles (RDTSC) converted to microseconds. 1,000,000 signatures locally. Percentile figures (p50: 42µs, p99: ~53µs) derived from Weibull distribution fit. Production validation at scale is pending.

Competitor data: Sourced from provider documentation, public benchmarks, and client migration telemetry. Not independently verified at scale.