Introduction

Welcome to the Succinct Docs, the place to learn about the Succinct Prover Network and how to use it to prove the world's software.

Introducing the Succinct Prover Network

The Succinct Prover Network is a protocol on Ethereum that coordinates a distributed network of provers for universal zero-knowledge proof generation. Succinct enables the generation of zero-knowledge proofs for any piece of software, whether it's a blockchain, bridge, oracle, AI agent, video game, or anything in between.

Instead of being restricted to narrow, application-specific use cases that required developers to build custom circuits and understand complex cryptography, Succinct makes it possible to generate zero-knowledge proofs directly from normal code—just like running software on your computer. This approach, also known as “ZK 2.0,” is uniquely enabled by our breakthrough zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) SP1, which abstracts away the complexity and makes proof generation as seamless and programmable as traditional computing.

For the first time, this enables a single, unified network for proving that can serve any use case: the Succinct Prover Network. By aggregating demand into a competitive system, provers participate in proof contests, an innovative incentive mechanism that maximizes efficiency and robustness, to make Succinct the world’s most efficient and robust proving cluster.

Why Prove the World’s Software

Succinct’s mission is to prove the world’s software. We believe that zero-knowledge proofs are a fundamental upgrade to computing that will not only have broad implications in blockchain, but also in redefining verifiability on the internet at scale.

Unlimited Scalability for Blockchains

Decentralized systems like blockchains rely on distributed consensus, where every participant redundantly reexecutes transactions to verify correctness. While this guarantees trustless execution, it comes at an enormous cost—blockchains today are slow, expensive, and unable to scale to mainstream demand. This bottleneck has limited their commercial viability, making them far less efficient than centralized alternatives.

Succinct zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs promise a path forward. They allow a prover to convince a verifier of a computation's correctness with a proof that is much shorter than the computation itself. By separating transaction execution from transaction verification, ZK proofs enable scalable blockchains where only a few participants handle expensive computation while others cheaply verify proofs. ZK proofs can power L2s, bridges, light clients, oracles, and AI agents by shifting computation off-chain while ensuring trustless verification on-chain.

Restoring Verifiability to the Internet

In 2025, bots and spam have proliferated across the Internet, overwhelming genuine human interaction and eroding the digital world. AI will soon flood the web with fake content—images, text, and media so sophisticated that distinguishing real from fabricated will become nearly impossible.

ZK proofs offer a way to restore trust by embedding cryptographic guarantees directly into digital interactions. Imagine attested cameras that cryptographically sign every frame they capture, ensuring images and videos are original and unaltered. Social media posts could prove they were authored by real humans, verified by secure biometric devices without compromising user privacy. Sensors in scientific research and journalism could provide cryptographic attestations that readings and reports haven’t been tampered with. Livestreams could carry real-time ZK attestations, proving they are unedited, preventing deepfake impersonations, and ensuring authenticity in political debates, financial broadcasts, and crisis reporting.

How Succinct Brings ZK to the World

Succinct introduces a third actor in the blockchain model beyond miners and stakers: the prover. Just like mining in proof-of-work (PoW) or staking in proof-of-stake (PoS), proving is an open and permissionless process. Anyone can participate by running a prover and contributing computation power to the network.

Coordinating provers in a decentralized network has historically been difficult because zero-knowledge proof systems were like ASICs—highly optimized but rigid, limited to narrow use cases that required custom circuits and specialized expertise. This fragmentation made a unified proving network impossible. SP1, our breakthrough general-purpose zkVM, changes this by acting like a CPU that can also prove its execution. Just as a CPU runs any program, SP1 enables zero-knowledge proofs directly from standard code—no custom circuits, no cryptographic expertise required.

In this way, the Succinct Network functions similarly to an L1 execution layer, where smart contracts can be deployed and executed in a fully programmable environment. However, unlike a traditional blockchain VM—where every node redundantly re-executes transactions—the Succinct Network selects a few provers through a competitive process to generate a cryptographic proof of execution. These provers compete based on efficiency and cost, ensuring that computation is performed optimally while maintaining decentralization.

At a high level, the protocol operates as follows:

• Developers write software in common programming languages (i.e., Rust, C++, etc.) and deploy it as a program to the prover network.
• Users submit transactions requesting proof generation.
• Provers compete to generate proofs, with the most efficient ones earning rewards for their work.

The Succinct Prover Network is currently available for usage on our testnet.

Next Steps

To learn more about Succinct please read the Whitepaper or visit the Succinct website.