zkDaily - 2026-04-09

零知识证明 zkDaily

ZKP Frontier Tracker 🎯

Thu

04.09

2026

Open-Sourcing Venus: A New Foundation for High-Performance zkVMs

OSS

https://medium.com/@cysic/open-sourcing-venus-a-new-foundation-for-high-performance-zkvms-b08fbb270ab7

Cysic zkVM GPU

@Cysic open-sourced Venus, a graph-based foundation for high-performance zkVMs, based on ZisK, designed to improve proving performance through global optimization and hardware-native execution.

Notes

Venus uses a graph-first architecture, encoding proving as a computational graph instead of traditional HAL.
Enables global optimization across the full proving pipeline, not isolated kernels.
Hardware-native execution maps directly to GPU models like CUDA Graphs.
Improves auditability with structured and inspectable proving flows.
Performance tests show ~6%+ throughput improvement over ZisK 0.16.1.
Provides a foundation for hardware-software co-design across GPU, FPGA, and ASIC.

Collected by @icerdesign

零知识证明 zkDaily

Q&A Deep Dive 💬

Thu

04.09

2026

Why use a graph-based design?

A graph-based design represents the full proving pipeline uniformly, enabling global optimization and reducing CPU-GPU synchronization overhead, especially for repetitive zkVM workloads.

How does Venus optimize sum-check?

Venus encodes multiple sum-check rounds into one computation graph, enabling batched scheduling and state reuse while lowering kernel launch cost.

Why is Venus better for high-throughput zkVMs?

It supports cross-stage memory reuse, kernel fusion, and global batch evaluation optimization, reducing latency and bandwidth pressure.

Prompted by @icerdesign