Succinct ZK Residency

Uma Roy

Aug 20, 2024 — 3 min read

The Succinct ZK residency is a 1 month in-person program hosted in Succinct’s San Francisco Office from September 23rd to October 18th. Recent advances in general-purpose ZK like SP1 have finally made it possible to iterate quickly with ZK with fast performance needed for real-world use-cases.

The purpose of the residency is to bring together teams that are either integrating ZK into an existing product or working on net-new ZK applications to an in-person hub to collaborate, exchange ideas, learn, get feedback and mentorship. Working together IRL to ideate and push the space forward.

With existing products, we hope to accelerate development timelines with tight, in-person collaboration with the Succinct team.
With new projects exploring novel use cases, we hope to enable exploration and ideation that can lead to longer term projects or even companies.

(Building with SP1 is not required, the residency is a broader gathering of the ZK ecosystem).

If you are interested in the program, apply now. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis (until August 30th) and due to limited space, we recommend that teams apply as early as possible.

On a personal note–my cofounder John and I met at the 0xPARC summer residency. It was one of the most generative times of my life. The people and teams that came out of that residency are working on the bleeding edge of interesting ideas in ZK & applied cryptography. We want to recreate a similar environment for the ZK builders of today.

Who should participate

Growth Stage ZK Integrators

Early Stage Builders

Exploration Stage Devs

If you have an established

product that is integrating ZK, send engineering talent to work side by side with the Succinct team and other ZK practitioners to ship a year’s worth of progress in an intensely focused “1 month hackathon”.

If you’re early in your product journey and ZK is a core component, join us and work together with other ZK natives for real time protocol design feedback. Get a peek at the bleeding edge of ZK being developed in real time.

If you’re a solo builder or small group of devs exploring and experimenting with new ZK-powered ideas, join the residency to collaborate and ideate with others. Come and rapidly iterate through different ideas together.

Confirmed Teams:

Several engineers from Polygon Labs are joining us to work on the AggLayer
Shumo Chu (co-founder & CEO) and an engineer from Nebra are joining us to build out their 2nd generation proof aggregation protocol
Sina.eth & Joe from Witness are building in the verifiable attestation space
Aayush Gupta (co-founder) & other engineers from ZK Email are coming to build a more expressive ZK email experience

Focus Areas

Track 1: Upgrade the stack. ZKPs are critical to make blockchains actually scalable and private. This track is ideal for teams who have an existing product they want to make better with ZKPs or teams building next-generation versions of current blockchain infra built with ZKPs from the ground up. Ideas we are excited by include:

Making existing rollup frameworks incorporate ZKPs (OP stack, Arbitrum Nitro, etc.)
New rollup architectures (based rollup, etc.) that benefit from ZKPs
Make every bridge a ZK bridge (integrating optimized ZK light clients across existing bridges that support modular security mechanisms).
Make state machines provable (MoveVM, SVM, etc.)
Proof Aggregation
Scaling Bitcoin with ZKP rollups
Scaling onchain data access and computation with ZK coprocessors

Track 2: Real-world ZK. ZKPs have applications even beyond blockchain use cases. There are many teams exploring this nascent space. New ideas that excited us include:

P2P payments
ZK based identity and Self-Sovereign Identity
Web Proofs
An Adobe photoshop plugin that generates ZKPs for every image edit (attested image editing)
ZKML
Credible auctions
Data supply chain

Confirmed Advisors & Programming

World class advisors and mentors: including Georgios (CTO @ Paradigm, built Reth, Foundry, etc.), Uma Roy (co-founder of Succinct), Dev Ojha (co-founder of Osmosis)

Weekly seminars and Q&A with industry leaders every Tuesday:

Guillermo Angeris on resource pricing in a ZK world
Shumo Chu on proof aggregation
Howard Wu (founder of of Aleo)
Jason Morton (founder of EZKL)
and more to be announced soon!

Happy hours + team presentations with people across the ecosystem every Thursday

Other Details

When: September 23rd to October 18th (4 weeks)

Where: The Succinct office (in San Francisco, near the Embarcadero) where every resident will have a dedicated workspace + desks

Stipend: There will be optional shared AirBnbs for housing and weekday meals that will be covered by Succinct. Additional discretionary funding for flights + relocation reimbursement (if not covered by your company) can be covered by Succinct on a case by case basis.

Grant Funding Support: Additional discretionary grant funding is available for builders

Deliverables & Goals: A shipped integration or product throughout the course of the residency, along with a technical write up.

Apply Now

Because applications are accepted on a rolling basis and due to limited space we HIGHLY recommend teams to apply earlier than later. Fill out the application here.

Timeline: