What makes Succinct stand out in the ZK track, and what attracts developers and miners to invest real money?
First, let's talk about their technical foundation. The SP1 zkVM developed by Succinct Labs is a tough character, directly lowering the ZK verification threshold for Rust programs. Now developers can casually write a piece of Rust code, throw it onto the Succinct Network, and automatically generate zero-knowledge proofs, which saves at least 80% of the development costs compared to building ZK circuits from scratch. It’s worth noting that what the ZK industry lacks most is a practical universal solution, and Succinct has hit the pain point with this move.
What I find really interesting is their PROVE mechanism. This thing is essentially a "proof competition" market that organizes global idle GPU computing power to bid for orders. When users post proof requests with a bounty, miners rush to grab the orders like participating in an esports competition—the winner takes all, but the losers still have to pay some electricity costs. This design is quite clever; it prevents large miners from monopolizing the market while allowing home miners to team up as a "proof pool" to make a living. Testnet data shows that the cost of generating the same ZK proof is nearly 40% lower than that of centralized service providers, and the speed can be 2-3 times faster.
In terms of application scenarios, Succinct plays even more creatively. Now, there are already project parties using it for four things: providing state proofs like compressed packages for Rollup chains, enabling trustless data transmission across chains, and even issuing "anti-counterfeiting proofs" for the output results of AI models. The most remarkable thing is the cloud computing setup—running the program in the cloud directly gives you a ZK proof, so users no longer have to worry about servers cutting corners. This idea of treating ZK as a "computational notary" is much more practical than simply telling privacy stories.
Currently, the Succinct Network has over 5000 nodes running, with a daily proof generation volume exceeding 20,000 times. Although it can't compare to the scale of Filecoin, it is already considered a leading player in the ZK-specific network. After all, the ZK proof industry has just started to heat up, and there are not many projects that can serve both the miner ecosystem and developer tools well. If they can maintain this dual-drive of toolchain + computing power market, they might really be able to take a big slice of the ZK infrastructure pie.