ELI5
An easy to understand overview of Succinct.
Imagine you have a Where's Waldo puzzle that you've solved - you know exactly where Waldo is. You want to prove to a friend that you found him, but you don't want to spoil their fun by showing them the location. Instead of having them watch you search the entire page again (which would take forever), you could do something clever: take a piece of paper with a small hole in it, place it exactly over Waldo, and show just that tiny peek to your friend. In a single quick look, they can verify you found Waldo without seeing where on the page he is.
This is a very simple example of a ZK proof. Modern ZK proofs, however, are much more complex and consist of proofs of execution of any computer program. They are one of the most important upgrades to the Internet since the advent of digital signatures and form an integral part of the decentralized Internet of tomorrow.
What is Succinct?
Succinct makes it easy to generate ZK proofs for any piece of software. Historically, generating a ZK proof for a program was a computationally intensive process that required specialized cryptographic knowledge. As a result, teams of cryptographers and engineers took years to build primitives like ZK rollups, ZK bridges, and more.
Succinct makes creating ZK proofs as easy as running normal code and turns complicated engineering into a weekend project. This code runs inside of Succinct's zero knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), SP1, which is a specialized computer that can prove its execution. To make proof generation even more simple, Succinct recruits specialized third parties called provers to generate ZK proofs on hardware they contribute to the Succinct Prover Network. They can use consumer hardware like GPUs and even accelerated hardware like ASICs.
Just like Bitcoin incentivized miners to contribute their computational power to the network, provers contribute their computational power to generate ZK proofs. Provers participate in the network similar to other decentralized protocols, by running node software and providing proofs to the network.
The Implications of Succinct
ZK is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that has broad implications for the way we do finance, manage our identities, and interact with media on the Internet. ZK allows us to scale blockchain systems to very high throughput without sacrificing verifiability. Rather than nodes having to re-execute transactions, a few provers can generate ZK proofs and most others can simply verify them. We can build very fast bridges between blockchains that do not require trust, allowing for the seamless exchange of value across blockchain ecosystems. AI agents can verifiably report their outputs and media on the Internet can authenticated.
Further, all this will happen on an Internet without trusted intermediaries. By making ZK easy to use, Succinct accelerates the development of the Internet of tomorrow.