Did Cysic Pause Its Custom Chip?

Leo Fan says Cysic paused further engineering on a custom chip for proof generation. Off-the-shelf graphics processors and field-programmable chips are already good enough for current proving demand, so the company does not need to spend several million to build and improve its own chip.

Leo Fan says the team had probably already put a little more than one year of manpower and capital into the chip, and had talked with potential buyers. Buyers were reluctant to pay anything. The market is not clear, the proof algorithms are not fixed yet, the market is not big enough, and the community has not reached consensus on which proof system to use.

The pause meant letting some team members go and shifting others onto different work. Leo Fan calls it a very hard decision, and says it deviates from the original vision for how Cysic would look over the next few years.