In the early days of crypto, trust was a scarce commodity. Payments were fast but fragile—dependent on middlemen, centralized servers, and unverifiable transactions. But a silent revolution was brewing, one line of code at a time.
This is the story of how proof-based payment models are rewriting the rules of Web3 finance—and how Succinct, Binance, and Square are leading the charge.
🔸The Problem with Trust
Imagine you’re a developer building a cross-chain application. You need to verify a transaction that happened on another chain. Traditionally, you’d rely on an oracle or a centralized provider—fast, but not trustless. What if they lie? What if they go offline?
Now imagine payments. A user pays for a service—say, API access or computation—but how can the provider be sure the payment is valid before delivering? Without trustless infrastructure, you're always assuming the best, not proving it.
That’s where proof-based models come in.
🔸The Succinct Solution
Enter Succinct, a decentralized ZK infrastructure network. Instead of relying on belief, Succinct lets you verify actions with zero-knowledge proofs—cryptographic certificates that confirm something happened without revealing the underlying data.
But what’s groundbreaking is how Succinct handles payment for proofs.
Through on-chain coordination and permissionless provers, developers can request ZK proofs, and provers can fulfill them—automatically getting paid upon submission of a valid proof. No invoices, no waiting, no third parties.
This model—proof-as-payment—turns computation into a marketplace: you prove, you get paid. Simple, secure, and decentralized.
🔸Binance & Square Join the Quest
This innovation didn’t go unnoticed.
Binance, ever a champion of forward-looking infrastructure, saw the power in Succinct’s model. By supporting the launch and integration of Succinct’s proof-payment ecosystem, Binance empowers dApps on its Smart Chain to tap into decentralized ZK verification—scaling security and reducing reliance on centralized bridges.
Then came Square, known for redefining payments in Web2. Now, in Web3, they’ve partnered with Succinct in an experimental initiative: Quest.
Square Quest is a developer incentive program, rewarding participants not just for building, but for proving. Developers submit ZK-based proof requests using Succinct’s tooling, and once a prover fulfills it, the smart contract autonomously releases payment. No gatekeepers. Just logic.
This is programmable trust at work.
🔸Payments Without Permission
What we’re witnessing is a paradigm shift—from payment on trust to payment on proof.
No more needing to trust centralized APIs.
No more manual verification of work done.
No more risk of underpaid contributors or overpaid freeloaders.
Instead, every action is cryptographically verified. Every payment is conditional on provable output. It’s not just innovation; it’s economic evolution.
🔸 A Future Proven
The fusion of Succinct’s decentralized provers, Binance’s global reach, and Square’s user-first ethos forms a triangle of trustless progress. Together, they’re transforming how value is exchanged, how services are rendered, and how computation is monetized on-chain.
The story doesn’t end here. In fact, it’s just beginning.
Because in the world of Web3, we no longer pay because we trust—
we trust because we can prove.
