Succinct Achieves Real-Time Zero-Knowledge Proving for Ethereum Blocks in 10.8 Seconds

Coin WorldTuesday, May 27, 2025 8:01 am ET
1min read

Succinct has achieved a significant milestone in the zero-knowledge proof space by demonstrating real-time zero-knowledge proving for Ethereum blocks. The company's SP1 "Hypercube" zkVM generated a proof for Ethereum block 22309250, which included 143 transactions and 32 million gas, in just 10.8 seconds. Internal benchmarks showed that 93% of 10,000 recent main-net blocks could be proven in under 12 seconds, with an average latency of 10.3 seconds.

This achievement marks a substantial leap in the zero-knowledge proof technology, leveraging a new proof system based on multilinear polynomials, optimized CUDA kernels, and a low-latency cloud architecture spanning hundreds of GPUs. Co-founder Uma Roy described this milestone as a "ZK man on the moon moment," highlighting the unprecedented nature of real-time Ethereum proving.

However, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out that the current results represent average-case performance, not worst-case scenarios. For real-time proving to be suitable for Layer 1 security, worst-case block proving must also remain within block times. Additionally, SP1 proofs have not undergone formal verification, and the energy requirements are near 100 kW per proof, far above the 10 kW that Buterin considers viable for home-based proving. He also noted that expanding Ethereum’s Layer 1 gas limit by an order of magnitude remains contingent on further proof efficiency.

Community discussions have surfaced around decentralization and proving capacity. Researcher Dankrad Odendaal argued for temporarily relaxing hardware decentralization goals for provers, noting that proving overhead has dropped by several orders of magnitude and that further gains may be possible through architectural improvements or specialized hardware. Odendaal proposed that proving is reversible, unlike other areas of protocol scaling that incur permanent burdens. Should scalability push against prover capacity, the network could revert to lower gas limits without long-term state growth penalties.

Odendaal also noted that proof generation can be parallelized across distributed infrastructure, making it less susceptible to centralization risks than full stateful nodes. Even without single-digit overhead proving, distributed proving across many machines could achieve latency targets while preserving a minority honesty assumption for system integrity.

The rollout of SP1 in a real-time context is the culmination of both cryptographic innovation and infrastructure coordination. Succinct’s implementation spans bare-metal deployments and performance-tuned distributed workloads, but the energy and formal verification constraints illustrate that proving remains on a trajectory, not yet an endpoint. Further reductions in latency and power, along with protocol-level integration, will shape Ethereum’s ability to anchor trust-minimized execution directly in its base layer.