@Succinct is a decentralized ZK proof generation protocol built on Ethereum, aiming to provide efficient and trustworthy verifiable computing services for scenarios such as blockchain, cross-chain bridges, AI, and games.
The project connects 'requesters who need proof' with 'provers who provide computation,' creating a 'ZK computing market' similar to AWS.
This team is not actually unfamiliar — they entered the industry spotlight as ZK tool developers early in 2022. But this time, what they bring is not another zkVM, but an entire decentralized ZK cloud service market.
This positioning forces a reassessment of Succinct's ambitions and layout.
ZK has always been regarded as an important pillar for the future of blockchain, supporting scalability, security, and privacy. But the problem is very real:
Generating is slow, costs are high, and it's too complicated to use.
It's like knowing how powerful math is, but no one teaches you how to write formulas, resulting in it being unusable.
What Succinct wants to solve is this 'usability gap.'
It is not about reinventing the wheel from the bottom circuit, but rather standing from an engineering and platform perspective to lower the developer threshold, allowing ZK to be called like an API.
The realization of this vision relies on two core components:
SP1: A general-purpose zkVM that supports writing provable programs in Rust.
SPN: An incentive-driven decentralized ZK proof network that provides computational power and security guarantees.
These two components build a complete ZK application framework: from program development, proof generation to verification execution, the entire process is seamless.
How does Succinct operate?
If you've used Etherscan, you might know: it's easy to put data on-chain, but verifying off-chain is hard, and proving 'you didn't cheat' is even harder.
Succinct's approach is more like an on-chain ZK crowdsourcing platform:
Developers use SP1 to write verifiable programs.
Users initiate ZK tasks (such as verifying a block or whether AI reasoning is trustworthy).
Provers compete to generate proofs in the SPN network.
Successful submitters receive $PROVE rewards, while failures or cheating will result in forfeiture of the stake.
Verifiers review proofs to ensure correctness and security.
This set of mechanisms does not run on any specific chain but forms its own system. Succinct aims to build a cross-chain, cross-application ZK-as-a-Service market, allowing all L2, Rollup, and AI applications to utilize trustworthy computing services.
SP1 is the underlying zkVM of Succinct and one of the core tools of the entire ecosystem.
Compared to other zkVMs, SP1 has several outstanding engineering features:
Fast: In Celestia's benchmarks, SP1 is about 26 times faster than RISC Zero.
Friendly: Supports writing in Rust, allowing developers to get started without delving into circuit logic.
Hardware-accelerated: Already partnered with ZAN and Cysic to promote deployment on FPGA/GPU.
Modular design: for example, the SP1-CC submodule can operate as a zk co-processor for Ethereum.
It is not a system designed for research papers, but a development tool refined for real engineering problems.
Currently, several projects, including Polygon, Lido, and Eigenlayer AVS, have begun integration and pilot applications based on SP1.
What Succinct does is actually not complicated: make ZK a widely callable cloud service tool, rather than a research achievement hidden in the laboratory.
It is not another zkRollup, nor is it a competitor to L2; rather, it is a 'trustworthy computing engine' that all on-chain systems may rely on.
