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What is Succinct?

Succinct is a protocol on Ethereum that proves the world's software. It coordinates hardware teams, infrastructure operators, and application developers to facilitate the generation of zero knowledge proofs. Application developers send programs in normal code that are wrapped with SP1 to the Succinct Network. This allows the infrastructure layer and hardware teams, who we jointly call provers, to compete to generate proofs of the programs' execution.

Sending your proofs to the Succinct Network feels just like running normal code. You can use the network to request proofs for ZK rollups, bridges, games, oracles, AI agents, and more. Via an auction-based approach, proofs are competitively priced and generated by the network of provers.

Succinct: The World's First Decentralized Prover Network​

The idea of a decentralized protocol in ZK proving is novel for several reasons. First, generating proofs is a computationally difficult task. Today, generating proofs for production workloads like ZK rollups requires using networked GPUs in a cluster. Because of this, generating ZK proofs for all the proving demand in the world is beyond the reach of any given team. It will require a coordinated effort of stitching together the world's compute, in datacenters and beyond, to meet the proving needs of tomorrow.

Second, proof generation will be subject to the performance gains afforded by accelerated hardware, just like other computation such as Bitcoin mining and AI training. A permissionless protocol that coordinates and incentivizes this buildout is important for ZK to become highly scalable.

Finally, a ZK proving network benefits from the automatic verifiability of proofs. In contrast to decentralized AI training, where it is not possible for a user to verify that a model in a datacenter was trained correctly on private or sensitive data, ZK proofs are self-verifying. A computation that is proven in SP1 can be automatically verified by a third party. This makes ZK proving particularly suited to permissionless participation.

Prior to the Succinct Network, attempts to scale up ZK proving have been bottlenecked by the fragmentation of supply and demand. For the first time, we can prove the world's software.

Key Features of the Succinct Network​

In its implementation, the Succinct Network sets up a global, distributed proving cluster composed of provers and requesters. The network is architected as a protocol that settles to Ethereum. It has the following key features:

Permissionless Participation​

Anyone can join the network as a prover, and anyone can submit requests by depositing fees. This openness drives global competition, ensures robust security, and prevents any single entity from monopolizing the proving process, ensuring users can rely on proofs.

Competitive Pricing​

Provers worldwide compete to generate proofs via an auction mechanism (proof contests). This competition drives the cost of proving toward its true market level and continuously rewards those who invest in faster algorithms or better hardware, while ensuring robustness. As more provers enter, network capacity expands and prices become increasingly efficient.

Easy User Experience​

  • Auction Node: A specialized node handles core coordination between requesters and provers—collecting proof requests, orchestrating proof contests, and streaming proof data to a data availability layer in real time. This unified approach helps match requesters with competitive provers.
  • Data Availability Layer: Proof data is stored off-chain, ensuring quick retrieval and minimal on-chain overhead. This architecture gets the best of both worlds: efficient proofs access with minimal trust.

On-Chain Settlement​

Requesters' fees and provers' collateral are managed by Ethereum smart contracts, enabling trust-minimized payments. Provers earn fees automatically upon delivering valid proofs. Provers also hold collateral in the system to ensure that if they fail to meet user-set deadlines, the collateral is slashed. No centralized intermediary is required for escrow or dispute resolution.

Inspired by Incentivized Physical Infrastructure​

Drawing on the success of Bitcoin (incentivizing global-scale mining hardware), Filecoin (incentivizing decentralized storage), and other networks, the Succinct Prover Network extends the model of decentralized physical infrastructure to the domain of ZK proof generation. Like these networks, it uses protocol-level incentives (the proof contest mechanism) to:

  • Attract specialized capacity (high-performance GPU clusters or custom hardware)
  • Drive competition on price and quality of service
  • Ensure ongoing R&D in proof systems

Crucially, while existing solutions do not necessarily deliver cost-effective, on-demand proofs to end users, the Succinct Prover Network directly induces free market competition on proof generation. We say more about this in the next section on Market Structure.