Comment by turtletontine
1 day ago
This part of the README answers the “why” pretty well:
> Both software and hardware implementations of Wireguard already exist. However, the software performance is far below the speed of wire.
> Existing hardware approaches are both prohibitively expensive and based on proprietary, closed-source IP blocks and tools.
> The intent of this project is to bridge these gaps with an FPGA open-source implementation of Wireguard, written in SystemVerilog HDL.
So having it on an FPGA gives you the best of both worlds, speed of a hardware implementation without the concerns of a proprietary black box.
Unless you physically build the FPGA, you still have a black box, but you just shifted the problem (now, I am not saying that this is a bad thing, since if you run Linux on Intel, it's still proprietary and people still run Linux).