Introducing Stage 2.5: The Provers are Coming Online

Stage 2.5 is here — and with it, a major expansion of the Succinct Prover Network.

We’re onboarding some of the best hardware teams in zero-knowledge proofs to help create the world’s most efficient and robust proving cluster. These teams will bring cutting-edge infrastructure and experience to the network as we prepare for mainnet.

We're also calling on our most loyal community members to step up, run our reference prover, contribute GPU power, and help secure the network. To support this, we’re airdropping testnet PROVE so you can stake to your favorite prover and take an active role in the future of ZK. Stage 2.5 marks the end of an extremely successful six month testnet roadmap, preparing Succinct for mainnet. 

Building the World’s Largest Proving Cluster

In our whitepaper, we set out to build the world’s largest proving cluster. We explained how this will entail onboarding the most talented node operators, data centers, optimizers, and hardware experts from around the world. These participants will compete to provide better costs and latency to customers on the Succinct Network and help prove the world’s software. 

To enable this, we’ve built a protocol that allows anyone to run a node and become a prover instantly. Achieving this open marketplace required innovation on several fronts: 

• We developed a competitive auction mechanism that asks provers to compete on cost. 
• A Sybil resistant staking mechanism to secure provers’ contribution in the network. 
• A performant, verifiable settlement layer specially designed for high throughput proof generation.

Stage 2.5 implements this system end-to-end. In short, the infrastructure needed to prove the world’s software is now here. 

Get Involved

Today’s release opens up proving to anyone. To diversify provers on the network, we’ve open-sourced a reference implementation of a prover and already started onboarding the best hardware teams in ZK and our most loyal community members as provers. They will join the competition to prove demand coming from real protocols that need ZK proofs.

If you’re a Stage 1 or Stage 2 participant, we’ve airdropped testnet PROVE to your account, along with some Sepolia ETH to cover gas, which you can use to secure your favorite provers and help them climb up the leaderboard. Stake to provers at staking.sepolia.succinct.xyz.

We’re also actively seeking partnerships with and onboarding the most talented teams interested in building competitive provers on the network. Running competitive provers on the network will require coordinating clusters of GPUs and perhaps even specialized hardware such as FPGAs and ASICs in the future. If you’re interested, please contact us. 

The Greatest Testnet Ever

Stage 2.5 marks the final stage of the Succinct Prover Network testnet. The Succinct Prover Network testnet has been remarkably successful. After onboarding 25,000+ users in Stage 1 and educating the world about being a prover in Stage 2, we’re well on our way to mainnet and the testnet is now complete. We’ll be announcing new prover teams on our network as they join, along with prover incentives and more over the next few weeks. Keep your eye out!

Disclaimer: The tokens you are receiving today are testnet tokens, not $PROVE tokens, and have no real-world value. They are solely for testing and development purposes on the testnet environment. These tokens cannot be transferred to the mainnet or exchanged for real assets. Please do not treat them as an investment or expect any form of value or liquidity.