ETH recently surged to $4200, coinciding with Ethereum's tenth anniversary. The recent TGE $PROVE price is also very attractive, having already surpassed $1.5, steadily pushing towards $2.
Recently, I have seen many newcomers join the DC to discuss coin prices and projects. I think many people are attracted by the continuously rising coin prices but are not aware of what Ethereum's expansion roadmap over the next 10 years will bring in terms of potential value for Succinct and PROVE.
So today I want to talk about the long-term potential behind the continuously soaring price of PROVE, hoping that you will hold PROVE as an investor rather than as a speculator.
1. So what does Ethereum expansion actually refer to?
Ethereum's ultimate goal is to achieve massive scalability without sacrificing decentralization, and it has clearly identified ZK as the core technical direction for long-term expansion.
From now on, increasing from dozens of transactions per second to about 10,000 transactions per second for L1, with a total throughput target of 10 million transactions per second for L2, the core challenge of this path is how to increase throughput while maintaining verifiability.
Under the existing model, L1 validators must re-execute all transactions. As Succinct's co-founder Uma puts it, 'Comparing traditional blockchains to a globally shared Google spreadsheet. Whenever someone updates a cell, everyone has to recalculate the entire spreadsheet to verify its correctness.'
This 're-execution of all transactions' model is an inherent cost of maintaining global consensus and is the fundamental bottleneck of scalability.
No matter how powerful the hardware is, having thousands of nodes repeat the same work is extremely inefficient. This is the core reason why Ethereum fully embraced the L2 roadmap in 2020.
However, L2 is not a panacea.
Whether it is ZK rollup or optimistic rollup, the final state confirmation must return to L1 for finalization.
This means that the security and finality of L2 still rely on L1, and the throughput limit of the mainnet will directly restrict the total throughput of L2.
Especially for optimistic rollups, which undergo a challenge period of up to 7 days during which funds and states cannot be immediately confirmed, this can slow down user experience and liquidity. While ZK rollups do not have a challenge period, the computational cost of generating high-quality proofs is very high, which also limits their adoption speed.
So if L1 itself does not improve capacity and verification efficiency, no matter how many L2s there are or how fast they are, they will also be limited by the bottleneck of the mainnet.
2. How to break through the expansion bottleneck?
In fact, the core idea to break the bottleneck is to eliminate the need for each validator to re-execute transactions in L1 blocks.
Instead, a proposer or a dedicated executor uses zkVM to execute full blocks and generates a zero-knowledge proof. L1 validators only need to verify this proof to confirm whether the computation result of the entire block is correct.
Ethereum produces a block every 12 seconds. Excluding the maximum time for network data propagation of about 1.5 seconds, it indicates that this process needs to be achieved in 10 seconds or less.
This is called 'real-time proofing'; as long as real-time proofing is achieved, the bottleneck of expansion will naturally be broken.
This is precisely the opportunity for Succinct.
In May of this year, Succinct's SP1 Hypercube was already able to provide real-time proof for 93% of the mainnet blocks on a 200 GPU cluster, with a year-end target of 99%, and reducing hardware requirements to a household level (≤$100k, ≤10kW), allowing more independent provers to participate.
After the release of SP1 Hypercube, it was forwarded and recognized by Vitalik, which also indirectly demonstrates its feasibility.
This is still an unfinished test version, but it can already basically meet the timeliness requirements for real-time proofing. When the official version is released, I believe SP1 Hypercube will be the best option for providing this solution.
3. What does this have to do with PROVE?
Aside from SP1, the more significant aspect of the Succinct mainnet is actually the Prover network.
The ZK track has a very high threshold, requiring extremely high computing power and a strong distributed execution network. It is unlikely for any single project to capture the entire proof demand market solely with its computational equipment, which is also not sufficiently decentralized.
But what Succinct does is more like playing the role of an 'integrator', collaborating with major ZK computation teams to build computational supply capabilities through the Prover network. On the other hand, it connects the demands of various chains, L2s, and applications, distributing their proof tasks to be executed within the network.
And $PROVE is the native currency of this network, used to settle proof tasks and incentivize computational power. Any chain or application that utilizes the proof capabilities of this network needs to pay in PROVEPROVEPROVE.
The key is that the proof tasks do not come from just one application or one chain. Anywhere that requires ZK proof can theoretically connect to this network.
This means that the value of PROVE is not tied to any single project, but is directly anchored to the total demand of the entire 'proof market'.
Currently, Succinct has already partnered with over 35 project demand parties, which will be gradually integrated in the coming weeks.
Conservatively estimated, if demand reaches Solana's throughput of 4700 TPS, with each transaction calculated at $0.001, it would generate $150 million in revenue annually.
To be bolder, if Ethereum L1 expands to 10,000 TPS, and L2 collectively achieves 10 million TPS, this would represent a potential annual revenue market worth billions of dollars.
So in fact, from the moment PROVE was launched on the mainnet, it entered a positive flywheel:
As Ethereum scales up → proof demand rises → $PROVE value accumulates → incentivizing a more powerful and efficient Prover network → carrying greater computational power and scalability → further driving up proof demand.
So when combining this income with the value of $PROVE , do you think the current price is still overvalued?
Your Ethereum test version has been launched.
Succinct has just begun.
