BC has already become a standard in Cosmos, but it has long struggled to stand alongside Ethereum. The reason is not 'who doesn't want to connect,' but rather trust and client limitations: IBC requires both parties' lightweight clients to verify each other, while Ethereum lacks efficient and usable implementations of counterpart lightweight clients.

In April this year, Succinct proposed a solution: to bring IBC's minimal trust communication to Ethereum, addressing the fundamental issue of 'who verifies the counterpart state' with zk-light clients. The article also presents the reality of IBC's monthly cross-chain volume exceeding $3 billion and covering over 120 chains, proving that demand is not a hypothesis but is waiting for the routes to be fully opened.

In the IBC community, the v2 design emphasizes 'making IBC ubiquitous,' directly addressing the old question of 'why redesign is needed': to extend the Cosmos experience to heterogeneous stacks, which requires solving client and proof issues while simplifying the development complexity of channels and application layers. By putting these two paths together, we can see Succinct's entry point—using zero-knowledge proofs to fill the gap of lightweight clients on the Ethereum side, allowing the philosophy of IBC to transition from 'within the same cultural circle' to 'across different cultural circles.'

If we return to the phrase 'trust assumptions,' the IBC official educational materials have already deconstructed it in great detail: what does minimal trust in inter-chain communication truly mean and how does it differ from relayers/multi-signature gateways? For developers on the Ethereum side, you only need to remember: when the counterpart state is confirmed mathematically rather than socially, your cross-domain communication can transition from 'trusting people' to 'trusting proofs.' This is the significance of Succinct introducing zk-light client to IBC.

Landing reading can follow three steps:

Check whether the proof costs and verification expenses of Ethereum-side lightweight clients have reached usable levels;

Check whether there are end-to-end examples of application layer protocols (assets, messages, arbitrary calls) on the channel;

Check whether relays and monitoring have production-grade operational tools.

When each of these three steps has verifiable milestones, you can establish 'cross Cosmos × Ethereum' as a normalized channel without intermediaries rather than a one-time demonstration.

@Succinct #SuccinctLabs $PROVE