Introducing Succinct

Succinct is where the developer community collaborates on applications, proof systems and proving infrastructure to build the future of ZK.

We believe the novel affordances of ZK will enable the next wave of onchain innovation. But today, the ZK developer experience is too burdensome and prevents adoption. Our alpha release is the easiest way to discover, develop, and deploy ZK. Get started with Succinct at alpha.succinct.xyz and integrate the powerful capabilities of ZK into your next-generation onchain application.

Succinct’s Alpha Release

The Succinct platform is built for the developer community, with the goal of accelerating ZK adoption. Succinct is a central location where developers can discover what ZK applications are being built and learn more about the latest advances and use-cases of ZK technology. Using Succinct’s best-in-class tooling, developers can quickly iterate and develop with ZK, using any proof system. The platform’s 1-click deployment workflow and reliable infrastructure allows for easy and smooth usage in production settings.

Developers can get started with the alpha release of the Succinct platform by going to https://alpha.succinct.xyz/ and deploying a demo application by following the instructions from the home page. The platform’s “create, release, deploy, integrate” workflow allows any developer to have a world-class developer experience.  

• Discover: explore what new ZK applications the ZK community is building. Find out about popular proof systems and their capabilities in one place.
• Create project: login with Github, connect your repo and use Succinct’s organization features to collaborate seamlessly with your team.
• New release: blazing fast circuit builds in the cloud and versioned artifact management for circuit binaries and verifier contracts. No more ssh-ing into a machine to run a build and forgetting what version of the circuit you’re using.
• Deploy: 1-click deployment of your verifier to any chain and a single page to view and track all your deployments. Never manually copy-paste verifier contracts into your Solidity project again.
• Integrate: use the canonical Succinct Gateway address on each chain to integrate verifiable compute into your smart contract.
• Request: request proofs onchain through the Succinct Gateway or offchain using the Succinct API.
• Share: share a link to your project on Twitter or Discord so the ZK community can see what you’ve built! Get featured as a trending project on the Succinct homepage.
• Fulfill: Succinct’s high liveness, production-grade, managed relayer infrastructure and autoscaling API endpoints enable teams to tap into powerful hosted proof generation. 

For those that are simply curious to discover what applications are being built on the platform, check out the discover page to see what exciting new ZK applications are around the corner. You can see how teams like Celestia, Avail and Eigenlayer are building with Succinct today. We hope that Succinct becomes a Schelling point for the ZK community to showcase the latest ZK applications and discover what’s possible with ZK. 

Our platform is a labor of love and the tool we wish existed when we started off with our ZK journey. We have been using our platform internally to iterate on several production ZK applications and found it 10x-ed our developer velocity. We hope the ZK community experiences the same magic we felt with this radically improved ZK developer experience. Fill out this form if you’re interested in using the platform for your ZK project: platform.succinct.xyz/partner.

The Succinct Protocol

The Succinct platform provides a world-class developer experience for ZK application builders, no matter their choice of proving stack. This approach is uniquely enabled by the groundbreaking architecture of the Succinct protocol: an open infrastructure layer with several minimally-opinionated standards and proving system agnostic components. The platform leverages the standardization of the protocol to provide unified workflows for any proving stack, making ZK development more modular and coordinated.

• Proof standard: The open-source, ERC-like standard enables developers to seamlessly link their onchain logic and inputs/outputs with offchain verifiable computation when creating ZK applications. This standard allows developers to use any proving system to create their ZK application, provided they standardize their public inputs and outputs to adhere to a simple specification. To link a smart contract with offchain computation, developers can request proofs via the Succinct Gateway contract and receive verified outputs post proof verification. This simplifies the process for ZK application creators by providing a standardized interface to integrate with any proof system through a single address on any chain. By integrating with the standard, proof systems can expand their distribution, making it easier for any application developer to use their stack.
• Proof Marketplace: Today all proofs on the Succinct platform are fulfilled by Succinct’s proving infrastructure. In the long-term, this infrastructure will evolve into an open proof market where provers will earn fees for providing their compute. The market will provide competitively priced, highly available, and decentralized proving to ZK applications. 
• Proof Aggregator: Today, the minimum cost for verifying a proof onchain is ~200k gas. We have been prototyping a universal aggregation protocol. It aggregates proofs from a variety of proof systems and sends the marginal cost of verifying a proof onchain to zero.

Similar to how the ERC20 standard made it easy for a variety of actors, such as wallets, exchanges and dexes, to integrate tokens, the Succinct protocol makes it easy for both application developers and ZK proof system experts to integrate new proof systems into production ZK apps.

Moving beyond monolithic: the future of ZK development is sovereign, modular and coordinated.

The novel architecture of the Succinct protocol solves the structural weakness of monolithic approaches that dominate ZK today.

• The lack of shared APIs or standards in a monolithic regime requires ZK application developers to learn custom tooling and integrate bespoke solutions, increasing adoption friction and imposing vendor lock-in. With Succinct, developers retain sovereignty over their use of ZK as Succinct’s unified tooling and workflows allow them to easily switch between different ZK providers.
• The ZK space is a firehose of novel algorithmic breakthroughs and engineering improvements that increase prover efficiency by orders of magnitude year over year. Developers relying on monolithic stacks with high switching costs are at risk of using outdated tech. Because Succinct supports any proof system, developers can use the best proof system for their task and modularly switch to the latest technology as research and engineering advances. 
• In the long run, there will never be one proof system to rule them all: a diversity of proof systems will persist to accommodate the diversity of use-cases. In today’s siloed landscape, there is significant redundant work by teams designing bespoke infrastructure for their proof system of choice. Succinct’s proof-system agnostic utilities and tooling are built in a coordinated manner so that all ZK teams can benefit from this shared infrastructure.

We hope that the Succinct platform enables developers to build with ZK in the best way possible and becomes a vibrant substrate for ZK experimentation.

Build with us towards a proof-based future

Ecosystem

We have been using our platform internally for several months alongside several build partners. In the coming weeks, we will be sharing how teams like Celestia, Avail, Eigenlayer, NounsDAO and Lido are able to build next-generation ZK applications with the power of the Succinct. Here’s a sneak peek of some applications on the platform today.

Build your ZK app with Succinct

As ZK builders ourselves, we have observed firsthand ZK’s promise and believe it will be one of the most important technologies of the next decade. There are many exciting next-generation applications that are made possible with zero-knowledge proofs.

• Light clients: Zero knowledge proofs of consensus can replace insecure multisig bridges and allow for trust-minimized access to state or data from other blockchains.
• Oracles: Perform large scale computations over historical state from the execution layer or get data from the beacon layer to calculate validator statistics, replacing trusted oracles with ZK oracles.
• Machine learning: Empower your onchain application with autonomous agents, generative art and customized user experiences using verifiable ML models.
• Cryptography: Verify any cryptographic primitive onchain, including ones not supported in the EVM, like Ed25519 signatures, BLS12-381 pairings, RSA signatures and more. 
• Privacy: Applications requiring anonymity, including private voting or hidden set membership can utilize the zero-knowledge properties of ZKPs.

If you are a developer interested in building any of these or have ideas for other ZK-powered applications, we would love to have building with Succinct. Please reach out and fill out this form: alpha.succinct.xyz/partner.

Integrate into the modular ZK stack

If you’re a team building a proving system, circuit language, DSL, SDK, or VM, we’d love to have you integrate with our platform and make it easier for the open source ZK community to build with your tooling! Please reach out and fill out this form: alpha.succinct.xyz/partner.