Overview
Succinct provides an out-of-the-box implementation of the prover software, designed to run a minimal node on the network. While this version is easy to set up and useful for understanding the prover architecture, it is not competitive with actively optimized provers running on the network. You should not expect to generate many proofs or operate profitably with this setup. It is best viewed as a reference implementation for developers building their own high-performance, scalable systems.
The reference node runs on Linux and macOS. There are two ways to run the node:
Hardware Requirements
Proof generation is highly computationally intensive and demands high-performance hardware. To be competitive, participants typically require high-end GPUs, FPGAs, or custom ASICs optimized for this workload.
The out-of-the-box prover software can run on modest hardware and is suitable for experimentation or learning purposes. However, meaningful participation in the network at scale will require a custom implementation capable of managing many prover instances across multiple machines or hardware accelerators.
The table below outlines the hardware requirements for both scenarios: using the out-of-the-box software for small-scale testing, and deploying a competitive, high-performance prover setup.
| Minimal Provers | Competitive Provers | |
|---|---|---|
| Nodes | >=1 | >=64 |
| Hardware | CPU or GPU | GPU only |
| CPU | 8 per GPU | 16+, more is better |
| Memory | 16GB per GPU | 16GB+ per GPU |
| Recommended GPUs | NVIDIA RTX 4090, L4, A10G | NVIDIA RTX 4090, L4, L40s, RTX 5090, A10G |
| Profitable | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |