HackMDAll chains will be ZK with prover networks.
Modularity has been unfolding rapidly—execution, settlement, data availability, and consensus are all being unbundled. This customizability in combination with rollup frameworks and providers like conduit, caldera are pushing the appchain thesis forward.
But this insane level of customizability is inherently incompatible with the way ZK is designed today.
Right now, rollups either don’t use ZK at all or develop their own custom, siloed proving systems—the biggest ZK L2 projects all maintain massive teams of cryptography researchers and engineers just to sustain their ZK stacks. These systems are optimized for specific use cases like zkEVM and can’t be easily extended.
That changes with the rise of high-performance RISC-V zkVMs like SP1 and prover networks like Succinct.
Historically, proving systems were rigid and application-specific, requiring custom circuits and deep cryptography expertise for every new use case. SP1 changes that paradigm entirely—allowing any computation to be proven, directly from standard software, just like running a program on a CPU. This breakthrough is what makes decentralized prover networks possible.
With SP1 and RISC-V zkVMs, proving is becoming a universal service—a plug-and-play ZK layer that any rollup or project can tap into out of the box. ZK L2s will rapidly shift their focus to protocol features like interoperability, while teams like Optimism and Arbitrum will get state-of-the-art ZK for free—just like rollups already outsource security to Ethereum, they’ll soon outsource proving to decentralized networks like Succinct.
Look at the history of computing. CPUs replaced custom hardware because a general-purpose, standardized system is always more efficient than fragmented, specialized solutions. The same thing is happening to proving right now.
Prover networks like SuccinctLabs are seeing rapid adoption. Teams like taikoxyz, celestia, AvailProject, Polygon, kroma_network, Mantle_Official, MorphLayer, PhalaNetwork, AlpenLabs, and many more are among the biggest users of our Succinct Testnet, leveraging decentralized proving to offload the complexity of operating their own proving infrastructure. The testnet has already generated over 300K proofs and proven more than 150 trillion RISC-V cycles in just the past few months.
The space is evolving fast—there are now over six zkVM projects and multiple prover networks set to launch in 2025.
The race to make proving available for every blockchain has begun.
