Cysic has open sourced Venus, a hardware-accelerated backend for Zisk designed to sharply reduce ZK proof costs, potentially bringing Ethereum L2 fees down while preserving instant finality and stronger security.
Cysic has released Venus as open-source code, unveiling a hardware-optimised proving backend for the open-source Zisk zkVM that could significantly reduce zero-knowledge rollup costs and make ZK-based Ethereum layer-2 networks price-competitive with optimistic rollups.
The release directly addresses the long-standing cost disadvantage that has kept ZK-rollups more expensive despite their stronger cryptographic guarantees and instant finality. Built on top of Zisk, now independently stewarded by SilentSig Switzerland GmbH, Venus replaces the earlier CPU-first opaque proving pipeline with a visible, composable computational graph that enables global optimisation across proof-generation workflows.
Key upgrades include native CUDA Graph integration, a full FPGA backend, and a preliminary ASIC design path, extending acceleration beyond CPUs into purpose-built hardware. Early benchmarks show measurable throughput gains on an RTX 5090 over the Zisk baseline, while FPGA support adds HLS kernels for Goldilocks arithmetic, NTT, Poseidon2, Merkle trees, FRI, and expression evaluation targeting AMD UltraScale+ and Versal HBM devices.
Released under Apache 2.0 / MIT dual licensing, Venus is positioned as an ecosystem-wide open-source contribution, with community testing and downstream development actively encouraged.
“ZK-rollups have always been the superior scaling solution – except for cost. Venus is our contribution to closing that gap,” said Leo Fan, Founder, Cysic.
The code has not yet been audited for production use, but if widely adopted, Venus could remove the economic premium long associated with secure ZK scaling.
