Cysic空投在即,ZK硬件龙头如何用ComputeFi掀起计算DeFi化革命?

ZK hardware acceleration company Cysic has been making frequent moves recently, and its native token CYS has confirmed that it will be launched on the Binance Alpha platform on December 11, while airdrop inquiries for eligible users have also been opened. Previously, Cysic completed a $12 million Pre-A round in May 2024, aiming to disrupt the zero-knowledge proof (ZK) generation market. Its core vision, ComputeFi, aims to transform computing resources such as GPUs and ASIC miners into programmable and verifiable liquid assets to build a decentralized general-purpose computing market, which may become another key piece of the puzzle for Web3 infrastructure after DeFi and decentralized storage.

What is Cysic? A leap from ZK hardware to a decentralized computing power economy

For many readers who follow the cutting-edge technology of blockchain, the name Cysic is first and foremost closely associated with “ZK hardware acceleration”. The company, founded in August 2022, was founded to solve the biggest bottleneck in the process of generating zero-knowledge proofs – speed. The slow generation of ZKPs on CPUs severely restricts the efficiency and availability of scaling schemes such as ZK-Rollups. With its deep accumulation in ASIC design and FPGA engineering, the Cysic team has quickly launched a series of products, from the portable accelerator ZK Air to the professional-grade miner ZK Pro, aiming to provide real-time, low-cost ZKP generation services to serve the thriving Ethereum layer-2 network ecosystem.

However, Cysic’s ambitions extend far beyond being a high-performance hardware supplier. In its latest published vision, the company proposed the grand concept of ComputeFi. This marks a strategic leap forward: from hardware acceleration focused on the ZK vertical to building a decentralized, universal marketplace for computing resources. In simple terms, ComputeFi aims to become the “DeFi of computing” that seeks to financialize, assetize, and capitalize the world’s idle or underutilized computing power – whether it’s GPUs for AI training, ASICs for cryptocurrency mining, or high-performance computing (HPC) clusters – through a unified protocol that makes it tradable, verifiable, and liquid.

This transformation is based on a profound industry insight: computing has become the core means of production in the digital age, but its supply is highly centralized and fragmented. AI computing power is monopolized by a few cloud service giants, ZK proof generation services are decentralized and closed, and mining computing power is concentrated in a few large mining pools. ComputeFi’s vision is to break down these silos and allow computing resources to flow and combine freely like funds in DeFi, thereby lowering the industry-wide innovation threshold and cost.

In-depth Understanding of ComputeFi: Architecture, Token, and Economic Model Analysis

To understand how ComputeFi works, we need to dissect its well-designed system architecture. Cysic Network adopts a modular hierarchical design, with bottom-up divisions into hardware layers, consensus layers, execution layers, and product layers. The subtlety of this design is that it allows computational tasks in different fields (such as ZK proofs, AI inference, mining) to be accessed in a modular form, while the underlying consensus and scheduling mechanisms remain unified. This means that a GPU cluster optimized for AI inference can seamlessly undertake tasks generated by ZK proofs through protocol scheduling in the future, thereby achieving true cross-domain computing power liquidity.

The core driving force of this network is a dual-token model: CYS and CGT. As the network’s native utility token, CYS is used to pay transaction fees, incentivize block production and other basic network activities, and is the “fuel” for the system to maintain its vitality. CGT, as the governance token, is obtained by staking CYS at a 1:1 ratio, which represents the right to participate in network governance and serves as a kind of reputation collateral for computing providers to prevent malicious behavior. This design separates network use, security and governance, forming an incentive mechanism that checks and balances each other.

core processes for ComputeFi task execution and validation

Taking a ZK proof task as an example, its full lifecycle clearly demonstrates the trustless operation of the system:

Task Submission: The requester (such as a rollup operator) specifies the task parameters (software version, deadline, reward amount) in the marketplace.

Provider Bidding: Multiple compute providers conduct weighted bids with their staked CGT and bids.

Execution and Verification: The winning bidder performs proof generation, and the results are sent to multiple randomly selected validators for cross-verification.

Settlement and Recording: After verification, rewards are distributed to participating providers and validators, and the entire process is recorded on the Cysic blockchain.

This process uses a combination of cryptographic proofs, redundant computation, and random sampling verification to ensure the correctness of calculations without relying on a single trust center.

Market validation: From capital favor to exchange initial listing

No matter how grand the technical vision of a project is, it also needs market recognition and real capital support. Cysic has already received solid endorsement on this point. In May this year, it completed a luxurious $12 million Series A financing, co-led by Asia’s top crypto venture capitalists, and international first-tier institutions such as Polychain, ABCDE, and Matrix Partners also participated. This round of financing goes beyond mere financial support, but also represents the recognition of professional investment institutions on its technical path and industry trend judgment.

Rui, an investment manager who is one of the leading investors, clearly pointed out the investment logic: ZK is the key to the future of Ethereum, and hardware acceleration is the only way to break through the performance bottleneck. Jeff Ren, another lead investor, also emphasized the value of Cysic in enhancing ZK accessibility. These views all point to the same conclusion: Cysic is on the track of ZK hardware acceleration - a highly deterministic growth point in the field of blockchain infrastructure.

The recent news that the CYS token will be launched on the Binance Alpha platform and start airdrops is a key step towards a broader public market. The first launch of an innovation incubation platform on mainstream CEXs not only provides liquidity exports for early communities and participants, but also means that its economic model and project progress have been initially reviewed and recognized by top trading platforms. This series of coherent actions from private capital to trading platforms has paved the way for Cysic to move from technology research and development to ecological operations.

Application Prospects and Industry Significance: Why Computational DeFi is the Future?

ComputeFi’s imagination lies in its wide range of use cases. It is not a project that only serves the needs of the blockchain, but aims to be a universal underlying layer that connects Web3 with real-world computing needs. In the field of AI, it can build a decentralized, verifiable inference marketplace where users pay for the correct AI output rather than simply trusting a centralized API. For scientific research, it can provide low-cost, verifiable sources of computing power for genomics, climate simulation and other research that require massive computing power, and promote open science.

Its impact on the blockchain itself is more direct. As the Ethereum Rollup ecosystem matures, the number of ZK proofs that need to be generated every day has increased exponentially. By building a global, competitive proof generation marketplace, ComputeFi is expected to significantly reduce rollup operating costs and improve its decentralization and censorship resistance. At the same time, it also incorporates traditional cryptocurrency mining computing power into the system, allowing miners such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin to flexibly allocate their computing power to ZK or AI tasks while maintaining the security of the original network to obtain additional benefits, which brings a new revenue dimension and transformation possibilities to the mining industry.

From a broader perspective, the infrastructure pillars of Web3 are being completed one by one: DeFi solves the problem of capital flow and combination, Filecoin, Arweave, etc. solve the problem of decentralized storage, and computing resources, as the “productivity” of the digital world, are the most lagging behind in the decentralization process. ComputeFi, promoted by Cysic, is trying to fill in this last and possibly the most complex piece of the puzzle. If successful, it will make computing a foundational, commoditized resource, allowing any developer, startup, or even individual to call the world’s computing power as easily, cheaply, and permissionlessly as they do today, which will undoubtedly detonate the next wave of innovation in decentralized applications.