Since the beginning of this year, the funding landscape of the global cryptocurrency market has undergone significant changes. The BTC spot ETF has accumulated over 50 billion USD in the US market, the ETH spot ETF has also surpassed 27 billion USD, while the SOL spot ETF is rapidly accumulating liquidity in the Canadian and European markets. The entry of institutions not only signifies "price increases," but more importantly, funds are beginning to seek underlying infrastructure that can support long-term narratives. History has shown that each round of large-scale capital inflow drives a new core narrative: 2017 was ICOs, 2020 was DeFi, 2021 was NFTs, and now, with the rapid increase in on-chain data volume and the complexity of cross-chain interactions, the industry's focus is shifting towards zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP).
The essential value of zero-knowledge proofs lies in reducing 'trust costs'. Big data reveals this trend: over the past two years, security vulnerabilities in cross-chain bridges have led to total losses exceeding 4 billion dollars, with most issues occurring during the verification phase; at the same time, the demand for identity and qualification verification from Web3 users is rising rapidly, with over 20 million applications for DeFi whitelists alone; not to mention the storage and retrieval of AI data on-chain, which will be difficult for financial markets to accept without effective authenticity verification. In other words, without a powerful, low-threshold, decentralized 'proof layer', the inflow of funds into the crypto market will ultimately be constrained by infrastructure bottlenecks.
This is precisely the entry point of @Succinct . Succinct's Prover network and SP1 zkVM, through modular design, distribute complex zero-knowledge computations, making proofs as simple as calling an API. This model not only lowers the development threshold but also significantly improves system throughput. More importantly, Succinct is not only for a specific chain but provides universal verification capabilities for the entire crypto ecosystem. Combined with the $PROVE token model, the network can form a positive cycle of 'demand side - verifier - resource market', where the larger the ecosystem, the lower the proof cost.
From the perspective of institutions, what does this mean? It means that whether it is managing ETFs with assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars or building next-generation DeFi protocols, in the future, a proof layer that requires 'no extra trust' will be needed to reduce compliance and security risks. For funds, investing in a single application may be too volatile, but betting on infrastructure pieces like Succinct is the true long-term value that can accompany the entire market's growth.
When the financialization of BTC reaches a critical point, the ecological expansion of ETH enters a new stage, and SOL becomes a new representative of high-performance public chains, zero-knowledge proofs will become their common 'underlying glue'. And Succinct is likely the most underestimated part of this infrastructure revolution.
In the current search for long-term narratives, whoever masters the 'proof' will control the trust dividend of the next cycle.