Succinct Unites 120 Cosmos Chains with Ethereum
Last week, the Interchain Labs launched IBC Eureka: the official deployment of IBC v2 along with the canonical bridge between Cosmos and Ethereum. Under the hood, IBC Eureka’s bridge to Ethereum is powered by the Succinct Prover Network and SP1, enabling affordable IBC transactions with zero-knowledge proofs.
Succinct is building a decentralized prover network, a protocol that enables the generation of zero-knowledge proofs for any piece of software, ranging from blockchains, bridges, oracles, or anything in between. With Succinct, users bridging between Cosmos and Ethereum can now access the scalability and interoperability of IBC through trustless and low-cost messaging secured by zero-knowledge proofs.
Why IBC Couldn’t Connect to Ethereum
IBC is a secure and permissionless interoperability protocol that enables trust-minimized cross-chain communication without relying on intermediaries. Since its launch three years ago, it has grown to support over 120 blockchains and now facilitates more than $3 billion in transfer volume each month.
Despite its widespread adoption, IBC has never been able to connect directly to Ethereum at scale[1]. The main challenge lies in verifying the consensus of Cosmos chains within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Cosmos chains use Ed25519, a cryptographic signature scheme that Ethereum does not support natively. Verifying a single Ed25519 signature can cost up to 500,000 gas, and with many Cosmos chains relying on tens or even hundreds of validators, performing consensus verification on-chain quickly becomes prohibitively expensive (between $10-$100 per transaction).
Succinct Makes IBC to Ethereum Possible
Zero-knowledge proofs make verifying Cosmos consensus on Ethereum practical. Instead of checking hundreds of validator signatures on-chain, ZK proofs can compress the entire verification into a single proof that can be verified for just ~200K gas (up to a 25x reduction compared to the naive approach).
While this has been theoretically possible for some time, putting it into practice has been a major challenge. Implementing a zero-knowledge proof system for IBC would have required a team of cryptographers to write custom ZK circuits and build significant infrastructure to support reliable, scalable proof generation.
With Succinct, the Interchain Labs was able to integrate zero-knowledge proofs by writing their logic as standard software, running it inside SP1, our general-purpose RISC-V zkVM, and outsourcing proof generation to the Succinct Prover Network. SP1 acts like a CPU that can run traditional software while simultaneously generating a zero-knowledge proof of its execution, making proof generation as flexible and programmable as regular computing. Meanwhile, the Succinct Prover Network provided the efficient, reliable infrastructure needed to generate proofs at scale, giving Interchain the confidence to rely on it in production.
Technical Architecture
Under the hood, IBC Eureka’s connection to Ethereum is powered by a Rust-based Tendermint light client implementation that integrates into SP1. By leveraging the production-ready tendermint-rs crate, the Interchain Foundation was able to reuse existing production-ready consensus and state verification logic, dramatically accelerating development timelines.
To boost proving performance, the Interchain Labs integrated Ed25519 precompiles, cutting proof generation times on the Succinct Prover Network down to just tens of seconds. These proofs are periodically requested on the Succinct Prover Network by IBC Smart Relayers and routed to the SP1ICS07Tendermint.sol contracts on Ethereum, which handle the end-to-end logic for IBC transfers.
Prove the World’s Software
We’re proud to support the Interchain Labs in bringing IBC to Ethereum for the first time, uniting two of the most prominent ecosystems through zero-knowledge proofs and unlocking a new era of trustless interoperability.
The most forward thinking teams in the space like Interchain Labs are choosing to work with Succinct for our best-in-class performance, leading security standards, and our role as a thought leader in the space of zero-knowledge proofs. Stay tuned for more updates on the Succinct Prover Network and SP1, and reach out if you are building with ZK and want to work with us.
[1] While it was always possible to use third-party bridges with a multisig or validator network, these designs had their own set of downsides such as trust assumptions, security and asset fragmentation. These trade-offs made a native integration with IBC untenable.
