Cysic leverages the Venus zkVM engine, recasting proof generation as a global computation graph and positioning ZisK within Ethereum’s emerging EIP-8025 proof market.
Cysic has released Venus, a new open-source zkVM compute engine that restructures proof generation around a global computation graph instead of a traditional hardware abstraction layer, placing the company’s ZisK stack squarely in Ethereum’s emerging L1-proof market debate. Announcing the move to “This paradigm shift delivers three core benefits: global compute optimization, reduced ineffective data movement, and significantly improved GPU utilization,” the team wrote.
Instead of treating hardware backends as a series of isolated function calls, Venus encodes zero-knowledge proof generation as an explicit computation graph that can be scheduled end-to-end for GPUs, FPGAs, and future ASICs. Cysic says this allows the compiler to “reorder instructions and coalesce memory operations across kernel boundaries,” reducing the memory load between CPU and accelerator and better accommodating the massively parallel nature of MSM and NTT operations. In internal testing, the Venus engine delivered “more than 9% end-to-end proof-time improvement compared to ZisK 0.16.1,” mainly by trimming CPU-GPU synchronization overhead rather than relying on raw hardware gains.
The Venus announcement comes as Ethereum’s EIP-8025 proposal, called “Optional Execution Proofs,” formalizes a multi-prover model for L1 block validation using zkVMs. In his explanation, Cysic notes that ZisK is “one of five zkVMs explicitly mentioned as candidates in official community discussions,” alongside systems like RISC Zero and openVM, and says the team can “complete proof generation for an Ethereum block in as little as 7.4 seconds using 24 GPUs,” meeting real-time targets. The project is “already live on Ethproofs providing real-time proofs for Ethereum blocks using a single RTX 4090,” and is listed as an Ethproofs integration partner as the ecosystem moves towards an L1-proof market.eips.
Cysic frames Venus as the software acceleration core in a larger stack that includes the ZisK zkVM at the protocol entry point, custom ASIC hardware as the compute base, and a ComputeFi network for scheduling tasks across different provers. “The real problem is not insufficient raw computing power, but a fundamental architectural mismatch,” the team argues, stating that a tightly integrated zkVM, hardware, and scheduling stack is needed to hyperscale Ethereum’s planned zkEVM-roadmap.university.