Episode 314 - Succinct's Platform, Prover Network and SP1

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week tun and I catch up with Uma from succinct we talk about the different products they have shipped in the last year from the work they did on ZK Bridge infrastructure The Blob stream X product with Celestia the succinct platform the Prov networks and their

recent announcement about sp1 we discuss how all of these products fit together what prompted their development how the competitive landscape looks the role of the provs sequencers aggregators of the future and more now before we kick off I wanted to highlight the ZK jobs board for you there you can find jobs from Top teams working in ZK so if you're looking for your next opportunity in the space be sure to check it out and if you're a team looking to find great talent be sure to add your job there as well we also have our upcoming ZK Summit event to look out for it's happening in Athens on April 10th the event is shaping up we've been adding speakers to the website and we'll share the schedule there soon as always this is invite only and space is limited there is an

application process and you need to apply to be eligible for a ticket if you've already received an invite to buy your ticket be sure to secure it we expect the event to sell out I've added the link in the show notes if you still want to get an application in hope to see you there now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor launching soon nada's a proof of stake L1 blockchain focused on multi-chain asset agnostic privacy via a unified set namada is natively interoperable with fast finality chains via IBC and with ethereum using a trust minimize Bridge any compatible assets from these ecosystems whether fungible or non-fungible can join nada's unified shielded set effectively erasing the fragmentation of privacy sets that has

limited multi-chain privacy guarantees in the past by remaining within the shielded set users can utilize shielded actions to engage privately with applications on various chains including ethereum osmosis and Celestia that are not natively private nada's unique incentivization is embodied in a shielded set rewards these rewards function as a bootstrapping tool rewarding multi-chain users who enhance the overall privacy of namada participant follow namada on Twitter @ namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg NADA and now here's our [Music] episode so today tun and I are here with Uma from cinct Welcome Back to the show Uma thanks for having me hey tun Aloha

excited to talk about proving n works and more yeah Uma you've been on the show before we did an interview about succinct back in November 2022 so over a year ago um I'm going to link to that in the show notes in that we do a bit of a background on you and the project and we I think John was on that one as well we did a quick interview or like sort of a casual catch-up interview in July 2023 this this is your third time on the show for today's episode what we want to do is a catch up on succinct because since you were on in November 2022 the project has released all these different products or initiatives back then we were talking all about bridges but since then there's

something called blob stream X you worked on with Celestia some sort of developer tooling for ZK approver Network slm Marketplace and then yeah last week and what kind of prompted this show was the announcement of sp1 so yeah I'm really excited to dig into all of this with you yeah for sure there's been a lot of updates quick disclosure I am an investor in succinct as tun is as well yes when we we had you on in November the main topic was kind of these like ZK like client bridging and we were talking about nosis um I think maybe where we can start is what happened with the bridge work that you were doing kind of what happened since

it's been really fun I think as you mentioned we've built a lot of stuff and shipped a lot of stuff so it's also been really busy especially with our recent releases of like the plans for the prover Network and also sp1 it's been really exciting to like see people finally using it um especially with sp1 like I think the open source Community really really loves it and has been really excited by it uh and even internally I think our team just using our own product has been really exciting cuz we've kind of left all the hellish circuit stuff behind so that's also been awesome nice going back to that episode episod where you introduced succinct at

the time you were working on the nosis bridge and generally I mean succinct we categorize succinct as a bridge company a bridge focused company can we talk a little bit about what came out of that time you know working on Bridges did you do other Bridges what stage are they at this point yeah so when we started to sync I think John my co-founder and I were really interested in ZK broadly uh and how ZK can be useful to like blockchain infrastructure applications Etc and I think bridging at the time was really top of mind for a lot of people because I think the Nomad hack has just happened like that summer and ZK bridging was like just becoming to be

possible so we were focused on that we thought it was like a really great application of ZK so we as you mentioned we had built out this ZK ethereum like client uh for that right now is actually helping secure the nosis bridge from ethereum tunsis and then from that time also came work with Celestia on building a ZK bridge for uh Celestia to connect Celestia to ethereum uh so we did ZK tenderman um because Celestia is a cosmos chain and so they do the have the tenderman consensus algorithm uh and then we've also been working with avail which is uh also a data availability layer and doing a ZK bridge for a veil uh they're using substrate um like the

polka dot SDK I guess that has a different consensus mechanism uh it's called like Grandpa and so we built this like ZK substrate Grandpa thing uh for them I think from November 2022 which was when I was on to like I guess last summer so like summer of 2023 I would say we were really focused on like building out all these Bridges we obviously didn't end up building a consumer facing Bridge um because I think at the the time like doing the ZK stuff was just so difficult like we didn't have time to even think about building a consumer like facing bridge on top like we spent all of our heads

space writing these circuits and like you know writing all this the ZK stuff that ultimately we were like ZK will end up in every bridge but like it'll be more like oh take all the existing bridges that are out there and then integrate ZK into them as a security mechanism rather than just like only being one ZK bridge I think that doesn't make that much sense actually so yeah that was like our big kind of conclusion from that was like yeah ZK is awesome really hard to use but it'll end up getting adopted by like everyone just using it um not us building like the only ZK Bridge was that at the time an actual idea though like when you were doing this you're building the infrastructure that could power these user facing Bridges had it crossed your mind to try to launch a Bridge Project

yeah I think even when we started the company I think John and I really love ZK like that was the thing that was exciting to us I know a lot of people like they viewed us as a ZK bridge but I think that's not because we actually were one I think that was more just like people saw ZK bridge and got excited and were like oh this thing is ZK bridge but I think we were always just much more ZK um much more so than bridging like ZK is the thing we were really excited about ZK is like why I got into this space ZK is like what I wanted to work on so I wouldn't even ever say that I was the ZK Bridge Project okay I think I am definitely guilty of categorizing you guys in the bridge category apologies what I am noticing that's interesting is

last time when you were on back in November you were trying to tell us not to use ZK anymore do you remember it was like succinctness yeah it's true we still are not really using the ZK property as much yeah I guess that is the inspiration for the name of the company fair I mean I know we're going to get into all of the new work uh coming up and I and I totally appreciate that most of it is it's focused on the succinctness side of snarks but do you do you think that privacy will be something that you are interested in or like even in sp1 is privacy one of the things that you can kind of offer I think privacy is like actually still really interesting so sp1 I think we can pretty trivy add privacy to it um and so

I am excited about that actually there was an open source contributor who was trying to generate sp1 proofs in wum they have like a PR in our repo so that you can do clients side proving with sp1 so that is like definitely something we do want to support um and I think it's like very interesting H nice all right so we just talked about some of the kind of infrastructure work that Bridges could use the ethereum light client and all of these other light clients I I have one question on this which is more to do with just da layers why does Celestia or Avil need a bridge to ethereum like is this work that ended up being put into like the blob stream work is it for the ual data availability like the basically I'm trying to figure out

is this a bridge of like a token bridge to ethereum or is this like the da bridge is this bridging their actual offering to ethereum yeah that's a good question so for Celestia right now the if you're a DA layer um so if you're a rollup using Celestia ail or whatever da layer uh as part of like the fraud proof mechanism or validity proof mechanism you need to be able to show like this data was posted on Celestia and so that's why there needs to be this bridge from Celestia to ethereum so that as part of like if your roll up settling on ethereum you have access to like information that oh this stuff was posted on Celestia or a veil or whatever other da layer you're using um so that's

why they need a bridge a unidirectional Bridge from a DA layer to ethereum um in a veil's case they're also using it I believe to bridge their native token to ethereum as well so they're using our ethereum like client on Avail and they the Avail like client on ethereum to do bir directional token bridging as well um but for Celestia just a unidirectional da bridge then is ZK tender is that kind of the same thing as blob stream if it's only that one that you know like is it the the foundation of blob stream X in some way yeah ZK tunderman is like the core of blob stream X and then blob stream also does some additional stuff on top by like

hashing all of Celestia's data routs to make it more easily available um so yeah blob stream is like a small thing just like on top of ZK tender okay so actually one one thing I've been hearing about a lot in kind of this whole like aggregation layer type thing that people have been talking about is this idea that the da layer would also store some type of like execution proofs like you know you you have your da the da you know maybe goes blob stream and then the execution side generates a zkp that like hey this state was used in this function and like this is the output of this function and then it tells the da layer

like okay like it writes some proof of execution like of usage and I think that this is like good because it like lets you do this like aggregation type thing at the da side is this anything you've been thinking about like or cuz like a lot of what you're talking about seems like almost relevant to doing something like that so interesting I that is like new to me actually so um I haven't heard of that I think it would be like build upon like some of the da stuff it sounds like a bit of like a generalization of the bridging we're doing right now but yeah that is like a New Concept to me okay cool I was just wondering because like I feel like you know we're talking about these one One Direction uni directional Bridges right I feel like you're missing out on

a lot of things you could maybe do if you had bir directional in the sense of like the da layers can respond and so like I I I've been thinking a little bit about like applications like that which which would be like a lot more efficient if you could like have some proofs between the two systems About Properties they can't validate about each other oh interesting yeah I see yeah that's definitely imposs probably be pretty easy to build with sp1 honestly well we we need to get to too hard all right I I don't know if this timing is completely correct but I know that in my mind there's blob stream X and then there's the snark toolkit or this developer tooling maybe I don't

know when each of those came out because I remember the announcement from succinct basically being like there's now this way to kind of easily use these tools tell us a little bit about what that is yeah so we had been like working for a while on our original ethereum light client and then also this like client for Celestia and for a veil and yeah the ZK developer experience even on our own team like obviously we have a pretty sophisticated team with a lot of expertise and it was just getting super complicated to like manage all these like circuit deployments like we realized for example that like every time you build a circuit we generally worked with pretty large circuits we'd have to like spin up a whole new machine store the artifacts manually upload them

to S3 and do all this like really manual stuff and it was just like a really horrible developer experience and so also at the same time a lot of random teams would come to us and say hey can you write me a circuit for XYZ and we were just like we don't have the bandwidth for that we're like a pretty small team so maybe you can try doing it yourself and they're like okay well it's like too hard to do it ourselves so that's kind of why we built the succinct platform um which I think is what you're referencing and we launched that around I think November okay um and it was really this like ZK developer tool for like you know people like ourselves or any ZK developer to make it really easy to like develop and deploy like any ZK application so it just made it a lot

easier where okay once I have like the circuit I can go to like the platform I can connect my GitHub repo and then it takes care of like building stuff like circuits have artifacts like the Prov binary and things like that so like takes care of all that like kind of infrastructure around actually deploying a ZK app um to production and yeah that was kind of the inspiration behind it was like born out of a lot of our work on building all these ZK Bridges and realizing like the ZK developer experience is like really bad um and like we were like trying to fix that um with like alpha. cync doxyz which is our platform one thing I think that is kind of interesting is this does remind me a little bit of to some extent AI tooling

uh and I guess you had a tweet about this so may maybe I'm I'm giving giving you kind of a layup for that but this idea that like hey the people who are like building applications or trying to use the systems end up going down the stack so they like start at the top trying to like build the application but then as they try to build multiple applications they like have to keep going down and until they're like doing you know sort of the full stack of infrastructure in some sense it seems like that was your journey here right like you were you kind of making different things you some of them you did Via circuits and then you kind of like went downstream so how how do you kind of think about the Journey of going from like building an application using ZK to like trying to over all make you

end up building developer Tooling in a VM effectively yeah I think that's like exactly right I actually used to do a lot of AI stuff so they totally agree with the tun like there's this AI company hugging face that they were building their own AI chap bot and then they ended up building a platform really similar to like our Alpha doing. XYZ platform because they realized like building and deploying with AI was like too hard um and we had a really similar Journey um where we like just kept on going down the stack to fix more and more problems with ZK so for example our platform was like made our lives a lot easier for building all these bridges for example there's a few developers on our team who are like focused more on

like deploying these Bridges to production and like they were using our platform and iterating with it uh they were kind of like the first customers of it and it's like helped them tremendously like stuff that used to take them like a month or something now it takes them like an hour cuz you can just click a few buttons and then every things like saved for you and like you know you can like see where all your verifiers are deployed on chain it's really easy to like monitor proofs it's really easy to see like what's going on um and so yeah stuff that used to like take them months is just like a really simple um for them now through our platform uh and then yeah the VM uh that we're building and like the pro network is like I would say maybe even another layer down the stock and like solving

the other biggest problem with ZK which is writing all these circuits is like really horrible you know just very difficult and requires like a lot of specialized expertise and then with the VM like you can just like write rust and normal code and so after we built the platform we were like okay this platform's really awesome it makes it really easy to like deploy stuff to production monitor it um request proofs really nice apis like we have like a built-in proof Explorer where you can see all the proofs and track everything which is like really helpful for our customers because they can see like oh is there a problem like you know what's going on but then we were like okay the biggest bottleneck to people using this offering is like no one wants to write circuits which is like totally fair

because like it's really difficult and then we were like okay so the answer to that is like a VM um and so that's why we were really inspired to build asp1 when you talk about this C like the cync platform alpha. cync doxyz I think you said which systems are actually supported which like circuits is there is like is it only limited to the the ones that you're working on or or is it like more General so it's built like really modularly um so it actually supports a bunch of different proof systems right now it supports circom ganar and plony 2 a lot of our current stuff's built in plony 2 so um it has really great support for that but it actually supports a variety of options and it's pretty easy to add new proof

systems to it and then it's not just our circuits like there's a bunch of teams using it actually like last week I think we also announced like wormholes using the platform so they had written own circuits for their ethereum like client in plony 2 and they are deploying it through the platform um I think there's a team from near using it to build like a ZK Bridge fer and then there's like some other random applications on it so there's actually a few different external teams also using it for their own circuits that they've written does it have any sort of security analysis of these things like given that people are just going to kind of use the tool to generate the code to do this I guess like is there any ever like a concern like what if there is a problem in one in any of these did you get it audited

our platforms just like infrastructure so it's not like security critical it's just it's just like a method of like saving circuit binaries and like apis for requesting proofs and like large scale distributed proving and things like that like there's no um like that your circuit is what ensures the Integrity of what you're proving if that makes sense um which is independent of rep platform I see okay so you you the circuit developer has to go get audited yeah yeah the circuit developer gets audited our platform just like helps you deploy whatever all right that makes sense I think I thought of it almost like an end to end like that you that you go on this and it sort of CHS out the entire thing for you but but I get it's more like it's tooling around a circuit yeah yeah yeah exactly okay so

then we can move on to the next thing that you guys announced which was the prover Network I saw that as like a Prov Marketplace but yeah what is the Prov Network and you sort of painted a bit of a picture of like going down the stack but how does it actually like from the succinct platform where you're built like the tooling around it why then a network actually let's define it I don't know if we've talked that much about it on the on the show Uma how would you define the proof or network okay maybe it's good to take a step back and and think about like okay when a proof gets generated there's like actually a bunch of different actors in like a bunch of different steps and like we kind of call that like the proof supply chain I think actually Nick Matthew at fman wrote an

article about it um but basically like you have of course your application that's like requesting a proof and then they they're using like some sort of proof system to like you know Express like their logic whether it's like a circuit or a VM then they request a proof then the proof gets generated and then it gets like potentially aggregated and then it lands on chain in the application so there's like this like proof supply chain with like a bunch of different actors um and so our platform right now is like a very simplified proof supply chain like you deploy your circuit on the platform and then when you send requests to like the platform we generate the proofs on our

infrastructure right uh so it's kind of like we are the proof entire proof supply chain I see now I think that's not like super sustainable because well first of all like you know we could maybe price it but then like today like you know I'm just like oh I decide some number that's like hey your proof is going to cost this much and it's not even like super clear especially as the proof supply chain gets like a lot more complex like I think Hardware is going to be like a really important part of that endgame there's probably even going to be a diversity of Hardware providers like are we going to be the best position to provide proofs at the cheapest prices no probably not also for example like if you're an application do you want to go talk to like 20 different

Hardware providers and figure out who has like the best price or capacity or whatever I don't think that makes that much sense and so like basically I kind of view like our appr marketplace network as like this protocol inste of standards for kind of taking our platform and making it into a protocol and like it's also a decentralized protocol which is nice cuz a lot of I think a lot of bigger projects that use us also want decentralization but it just like this protocol for having all the people in like the proof supply chain kind of like coordinate and talk to each other in like one place so that's kind of how I view it if that makes sense but you just mentioned that it's like bringing like taking the platform into turning it into a protocol but do you mean that succinct

platform like the one that's building the tooling around circuits is that what you meant by platform or do you mean something else yeah yeah I know I yes I do mean that like I I kind of view like our current alpha. sissing doxyz as like our prover Network Alpha actually like I think today if you use alpha. sissing doxyz you deploy your application there and then we fulfill all the proofs for you but over time like once our like Prov Network and Marketplace goes live you can imagine that there will be like this competitive auction for a bunch of different people to provide proofs that are requested through that interface and so like in the fullness of time I kind of view alpha. sissing doxyz as like a

deployment interface to our network if that makes sense I didn't think of it that way when you described it sort of the it creates things around a Circ I've definitely talked to a few different teams doing Pro networks but I don't actually know what the what the exact thing that is happening like what part is being proved I thought it was kind of the whole thing like I thought that it was like they sent you the thing that needs to be proved and then you generate the entire proof in the Pro network but if you're using this platform which from what I understand like it only generates something around the proof it's not the full proof no no no right now it does generate the proof maybe it's best to just start with like what is the Prov network doing the pro

network is something where like you deploy an application on the pro Network you say like here is something that will generate a proof like here is like how you can generate a proof so it's like some proving binary or like some C circuit artifacts and then you have this like competitive Marketplace auction whatever mechanism uh and you have this like set of people who are provs who like actually generate the proof uh and then it gets verified and then they get paid right so that's like very simple to understand right it's like you're a marketplace where like people are sending proof requests and you're matching them with like provs who are like generating proofs our platform makes it easy for people to like send proof requests like it's just like a set of like it's like tooling to make it easy to like deploy your circuit send

proof requests whatever um I view our platform is like something that like makes it easy for anyone to want to proof cuz like right now if you want to send proof requests like there's no like unified standards for all that stuff got it and then like right now our platform we like run all this infrastructure and we are generating all the proofs but that's not like necessarily the most sustainable or desirable thing and so in the fullness of time when we have a pro Network anyone will be able to like generate proofs and so in that sense Alpha dosn doxyz is kind of like our prover Network Alpha like it's like kind of like what is live of the network today I see um and then over time as we like build out more of the protocol and build out the auction mechanism

hopefully with tun's great help um we will be able to like turn that into like a more full-fledged Network where like anyone can like help provide proofs and it like provides way better prices for users and things like that I see so it's sort of One Piece along the chain at the in those Pro networks the proof generation like I'm assuming if you are kind of creating a pro Network you're creating almost like the client software the prover software that aover would be running yeah would that be then like a next step for you guys like is that what when you kind of announce a pro network is that what you still would be building yeah so I think like the actual node software that provs in the network run um can be like pretty

minimal like basically if you're aover you would like what do you have to do you have to basically participate in this like auction and like say hey I'm going to generate a proof for this price and then you have to like be able to download like the circuit binaries and artifacts and then actually like run them and generate the proof and things like that mhm and so we will have to build like some node software but I think that part is like can be fairly minimal okay do you think there'll be like enough standardization such that like the infrastructure cost to like the actual provs is like relatively low or do you think it will be end up being this type of thing where like okay some particular proving systems are like extremely bandwidth intensive or

extremely compute intensive but are not memory intensive some are much more memory intensive and like me as the prover participating the network I might get a request from all these different particular systems and then I effectively have to have you know multiple different types of infrastructure Hardware to to generate them how do you think about like the homogeneity versus heterogeneity of like the networks over time because I think that that that's sort of obviously a important factor yeah that's a really great question so I think it might end up looking somewhat heterogenous actually but I think the way we've been thinking about architecting it is very similar to how like Igan Lair has

architected their abss where if you're a node operator participating in igen layer you can opt into like which avss you run right so like you only choose like hey I'm going to run three these X Services because it makes sense for me and I think nodes like provs in our network will be really similar like you can say hey I'm cool generating blob stream proofs I'm cool generating like the Avail proofs I'm cool generating like this other proof and like that's all I do and I just participate only in those you could also have really specialized provs that are like hey like my Hardware is like best suited for VMS like sp1 like I'm just going to participate in that um so I think it will it might end up being pretty

heterogenous but I think that's actually okay because it's like opt in and it's just like a marketplace right so like that's fine right as long as you induce competition amongst the people who are participating like it's fine if not everyone's participating in every single like proof can we talk a little bit about those auctions kind of where are you at in your thinking around that is that something like the game of the marketplace almost the the incentives the making sure that like the people who are doing these proofs can actually earn enough Revenue to cover at least cover their costs hopefully make something yeah how like how are you thinking about that I mean I'm guessing you have to sort of predefine it pre-think out like a lot of the Nuance of that yeah so so we've definitely put a little bit of

thought into like how to design a great auction I I've actually talked with tun a little bit about it and um his other collaborator K as well um and also talked a little bit about it with yeah all of tun's like mechanism design auction uh people which has been a lot of fun so we've started thinking about it um I think there's like you have to be pretty careful with like how you design the mechanism obviously um so yeah in short we've started thinking about it but I think we're like hoping to collaborate with like a lot of like really great people who have like a lot more expertise in like auction design and stuff like that um to make it like really robust um for the long term but we also might just like start with something simple and then like iterate you know I think the interesting

question is like you know if if you have something like what you talked about where people opt in and out of particular services like can you just have per service auctions or like per type auctions almost like you know uh if I think about like nodes on AWS or Google cloud like there's like preemptable prices for each type or and sort of that's like the implicit auction for each type or do I need to actually like do something across the different types because like oh I'm proving I'm doing aggregation across multiple networks right this is also maybe slight tangent why I've been trying to understand all these people talking about like these you know I think polygon in particular has been talking about these like

aggregation um type of things have it right yeah yeah and like aggregating over multiple rollups and like I do think you run into this issue at least of what I'm talking about where you actually make like the economics a lot more complicated for that versus like the single node one and like I think that's that you know this heterogenous versus aous question is like fundamental to that in a lot of ways yeah that's that's really interesting yeah I think it would be a lot easier if everything was homogeneous for sure but I just think I mean our op opinion and this also kind of informs like our sp1 design and stuff is like in the fullness of time it's just not necessarily super sustainable to be like

this is the only proof system you'll use or like this is the only VM you'll use like ZK is just like so full of like Innovation and it it goes so quickly that like that's why on like our platform and also like our Pro Network like we're supporting you know everything so we want to support all these different proof systems we want to like a mechanism that's like robust to this heterogenity I guess um cuz I think that's like the most sustainable way to design it um I think the auction will probably in its simplest form just look like per type uh kind of like what you said like AWS has like spot pricing just like per CPU type and I think that should actually work reasonably well but

yeah I think it is an interesting question like whether there's something like more optimal to do one thought that I've been having around the prover Network proof and Marketplace kind of concept has been like the role of the shared sequencer like the shared sequencer story says and this sort of speaks to what you're saying tun like that's the the I think the what do you call it accumulator accumulation aggregation the aggregation so like to me that's sort of like a shared sequencers level right is that kind of what you'd also call it yeah I I actually think this is going to be one of these very weird things where the terminology for what a sequencer is is going to get unbundled over time like right now the sequencer is like the single point and these aggregation

things are like hey I have a sequencer uh sequencing roll up 569 but this sequencer is not like a powerful enough sequencer like it's not sequencing op or our main net and now it's getting aggregated with the opnr mainnet sequencer so like all these designs for like either shared or decentralized sequencers are kind of like implicit in all of them like unbundling the roles the tasks that a sequencer does into you know kind of substituent jobs and I think we're going to get words where like sequencer will equal the union of the set of tasks all and and and each thing will be some subset so like a sequencer this is why because like I was trying to think like who will be doing the proofs for the

rollups like it's I'm assuming it's the sequencers are running the proving node software as well and then you're talking about like these nodes choosing which prover software but and they're also in this like sequencer hierarchy but tun do you think there will be like a meta sequencer original like eventually that kind of emerges some sort of like Mecca I don't know what you call this but like um the Power Ranger of all of these tools somehow Power Ranger Wow by the way that's a weird reference that's like after my time like power I was too old for Power Rangers I I think I was I was exactly the time of Power Rangers when I was like four

yeah five um if this aggregation type of thing is the final state of like the best tradeoff when you have heterogenous demands when I say heterogenous demands I mean you know let's take salana as one type of demand Network right of like people want low latency and like sort of are willing to take more variance in their fees versus say like ethereum main net which if it's mainly just settlement plus some very large trades you know settling like unisoft XO trades or something and then layer twos which have a lot of demand they maybe have like latency constraints but they're going to be very heterogenous right like base is going to be a very different rollup than like farcaster chain which is going to

be very different than what right like if you if you if you just look at their loads they're going to like look very different right so I think if you believe in the long run that everything will just be aggregated zkps then I think the final boss is kind of what Uma is talking about of like this network of people who are generating the the proofs and then part of the network is assigned to do the aggregation part of the network is assigned to do the individual things and like you stake and you get allocated to each of those and the final boss is just like that Network right and so there's a world in which that could that could be the the end state if if like everyone if this kind of aggregation view of the world is is true it's definitely something that feels

like the final boss but like I don't know how close we are but um probably has a much better prediction about no we're close we're close to Rin um no I I so agree with you like I feel like in like this modular thesis like modular stock there's going to be sequencing which is just ordering right like even if you look at like espressos docs or other decentralized sequencers like they're just doing ordering they're not doing any proving those nodes are optimized for like super high through like let's just order stuff then okay now let's like prove all the stuff that's been ordered and that's going to be like going through this like proving Network right and so then the proving network is going to like coordinate like okay who are the hardware providers and like who are these like operators who

are actually going to be like generating these proofs as Chun said exactly like aggregation is just another like job type on the proving Network it's just like hey now we have an task that requires an aggregation proof so that will get coordinated all in the proving Network and then it gets settled on like ethereum or whatever other like train is being used uh maybe the da is posted on like a separate layer um so yeah I think it'll be like sequencing proving settlement da is kind of like the ultimate stack but this is the thing is like going back to that concept of an agent this is sort of the way we think about it like aover a sequencer like I imagine that's still being like one entity in a

way or do you guys see that as like truly like you go through this Marketplace and then this Marketplace and then this Marketplace is all different entities running these agents or like I'm speaking a little bit because of the ZK validator like we're just thinking like from the validator perspective as we explore this kind of stuff we sort of imagine we could run a lot of these things at the same time maybe there's teams that build or maybe the teams that are kind of developing this build like a SC a a combo sequencer prover da Check I don't know all of that I guess I'm trying to figure out is there a reason one would want to separate them or do you want to put them together no you could imagine a network where you're like imagine a proof of

stake Network where like we stake some assets on the final settlement chain say we're reaking eth or we're staking eth or locking eth into a contract yeah and the staking Network takes you know let's say there's like a 100 people participating with each different varying amounts it samples them randomly based on the amount of stake they have and assigns them to a category so it doesn't just randomly choose a leader for validating the whole block it chooses a leader for the prover a leader for the aggregation part a leader for the da whatever you know getting that right is hard right because you've turned this one-dimensional selection problem into a portfolio selection thing right like I have to have to be kind of fair to choose each of these tasks but the idea is is still you could imagine

this world of doing proof of sake where you're actually picking multiple classes of these agents assigning them for an Epoch or and the other thing that's important I think in the sequencer world that people don't think about as much in the layer one world is that in the sequencer world you actually don't really need to be constrained to picking a new leader every block you can play with the time element a lot more because you have the fraud and I mean in you should have the fraud and verifiability guarantees so you could have a longer Epoch so someone gets picked for a week to be the sequencer right and I think the two Dimensions you have to play with in these kind of what these sort of modular networks will look like is a how

do I can can I convince people to stake a single asset and then based on that single asset stake you get assigned to each of these tasks that you have to be able to do and maybe you you indicate that like you you maybe I don't have proving Hardware so I I can when I stake I opt out of being selected to the leader for proving I'm only the leader for da and being a normal proposer you could imagine Network allows you to express that preference um and then you know you get selected like sortition style but the thing is I think there's going to be two dimension one is the set of tasks like fa BL proof yeah and the other is time like how long what's my lease like when I get selected what's my

lease on that you know if you think about the normal cloud computing world that is how you pay for services right like I rent uh a GPU node and it's only like hourly or I rent a fpga node and it's like you have to commit to at least six hours right like a lot of these microservices and Min Services which are the sort of thing that inspired the modular World they already do this type of stuff it's just that they don't have to do this thing where they pick they randomly assign people to the task to be fair yeah which is that's where it's different in this world yeah and that in their case they're providing the service based on those kinds of Dimensions but in this case you're picking the person to or the agent to provide the service yeah and they get compensated exactly

yeah for each of the different sub subset of services that's interesting to think about so like I think that's the final boss the question is like will there be a single Network to rule them all in that world and arguably reaking is the closest thing to that because you can reuse eth for doing all the services in some in some weird shape and form it like actually kind of is the closest to that final piece interesting okay so I want us to also talk about you know sort of the the announcement that prompted this interview sp1 um when I saw that and I also had seen all of these other announcements I was like I think it's a really good moment to have Uma back on

the show to go over it let's talk about what sp1 is and how that relates and this is maybe where it's actually I've had a bit of a hard time understanding how it relates to the other work that you've done so yeah what is sp1 yeah so sp1 is a 100% open- Source ZK VM that in short if you want to use ZK you can just like write rust and then you get a proof more technically what sp1 is is it is a risk five um ZK VM yeah it has really state-of-art performance for a lot of like kind of technical reasons I can get into and yeah that's kind of like what it enables um and yeah I think it's been

very exciting for the open source Community for its performance benefits for a lot of different things um and yeah it's something that we're building at cync and it will plug into our appr nwor eventually like that will eventually be like the best way to use um sp1 so yeah also happy to talk about that connection cuz I think that has not been super obvious to people yeah I thought it it to me it was kind of like the the announcements came and they seem like I actually had trouble linking them together I think you've made a really good connection now for me from that succinct platform to the pr Network and I mean I guess I can imagine this connection which is like with a really powerful really like if if a lot of proofs are being generated on a ZK VM

using rust all of a sudden the volume is there to be able to like have aover Network which would be like yeah you wouldn't want to then be Pro doing all those proofs yourself um but it's almost like you did it like in a in a funny way like the prover Network comes before the thing that would use it right like the sp1 is using the pro network am I right is that the connection Point yeah yeah yeah like I think the prover network is like the base layer that like Powers everything and then like right now the demand for the pro Network it's just like too hard to write a circuit to like want a proof like right now even for us to get to the point where we are consistently wanting proofs we had to do this like horrible terrible like 3 month

four month circuit development and now with sp1 we can just like write rust in an afternoon and then now we just like want proofs um like a stream of proofs for our application so that's kind of how like we view1 it's like it yeah it's like creating demand for the network um and making ZK developers lives easier and also you know maybe thousand Xing like the total number of developers that can use ZK totally honestly probably more than thousand X thing like anyone knows rust that can use um I mean to be fair let's let's just do some back of the envelope Mount the number of people who've probably written a ZK circuit is probably like under 200 would you say more now maybe okay 5 I think it's more now but you're definitely under a

thousand under a thousand okay so THX means you want a million ZK developers just I just want to give you concrete numbers to these claims all right yeah like how many people do you think know rust yeah that's got to be in the millions so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so so so maybe a thousand ex yeah I think it's just worth sometimes sanity checking these these numbers you know now I'm convinced crazy all right so sp1 zkm risk five under the hood I think we should mention that there is another project I investor in that project trun I don't know if you are very tiny investor okay so this is risk zero so risk zero has been on the show a couple times they have talked about like

the risk five concept to me they I mean they definitely like pioneered that idea of like you can use rust as is would you say is sp1 very similar to risk zero yeah I think it's interesting because like we launched this and I think a lot of people are like oh it's so competitive whatever um I think for us honestly like we really view sp1 as this like open source public good that like hopefully can be positive some for ZK cuz like I think we just need more than a thousand people to be able to use ZK if that makes sense um so I don't view it as like extremely directly competitive like it is very similar now I'm the reason we built it is that um risk zero not all their stuff is open

source so in fact like the core logic of like what are the strains and blah blah blah is actually closed Source um they have this like I think it's called zuren compiler that is closed Source where they like write all like the logic of the VM and then what's open source is like this autogenerated like like the compiled version is all open source but that's like it's not modifiable by any external team um and so for us like we were really curious about ZK VMS we really wanted to use one even internally but for us like because we couldn't modify risk zero it was just a non-star harder to even think about using it because it was just not performant enough like for a lot of the use cases

we care about like tender or our bridging use cases or even a ZK evm because we couldn't modify rist zero there was no path to getting better performance and so that was why we were like okay well we need to build like a truly open source dkbm where it's customizable it's modifiable by the community there's no like vendor or platform or lock in Risk it's just all out there and we kind of looked around cuz like we were like okay like has anyone built this like and there just wasn't anything out there that was 100% open source performance and then we were like okay like let's go build this um so yeah I think the biggest difference is that it's 100% open source and because of that because it's customizable it's

also a lot more performant cuz you can really like add these we call them pre-compiled um to get the performance you want for use cases that are really important for us so yeah that was kind of the motivation could we talk about the relationship between sp1 and planky 3 and like which components you used and how you know where the separation is like in you know just get a little architecture D because obviously you're using py 3 under the hood but it would be great to kind of understand which components since there's a lot of stuff there yeah so we are like really big Believers in like open source and I think we kind of think like the terminal Z KVM will be like this truly 100% open source public good because like the code has to be open source and be modifiable

for I think honestly for anyone serious to really use it and we looked around at the landscape we had been previously really big users of plony 2 um which is this proof system developed by Daniel Luv and Brendan and other people at polygon zero MH and we had been big fans of it and Daniel um had started working on py 3 Pony 3 is like this Library SL toolkit of like modular components that like like people can use to build new proof systems new ZK VM stuff like that like it's kind of like this Library um toolkit type thing and yeah we looked at Pony 3 we'd already been of course familiar with like the high Lev structure because it's similar to Pony 2

and it's like super high quality code um it has like you know a good open source Community around it and so we built sp1 using plon E3 so for example all a lot of our constraints and stuff like that are expressed with like plon e3's air Builder and things like that um and we've also contributed back to plony 3 like we I think there's a few PRS our team has merged into like Upstream into Pony 3 as we've like uh CU it's not like fully finished yet and they're always adding stuff so we've also like contributed Upstream um back to Pony 3 are you one of the first to be using plony 3 in production or is it already being used elsewhere um yeah it's a good question who else is using it I think there's a few other teams that are like

using it or thinking about using it um oh there's there's this project called Vita that's um also using it that Daniel um and some other people are working on yeah um and then I think there's also a few other ones that maybe aren't public yet I see I see would you I mean kind of going back to the the competitive landscape are there any other products other than risk zero that like are also in the same category because there are these other ZK VMS there's other like rust based VMS that we've also heard about yeah is there anyone else that you kind of would have been looking at kind of in that in that competitive space yeah I actually think for example um the Andre team has been working on lass and

jol like it's Justin Taylor Sam roxdale and um Michael I think his last name is Michael Z I don't know exactly what his last name is but they've been working on last one jolt which has like a very similar Vision um and I do think there are a few other projects with very similar Visions like some I think think with like folding based approaches I've heard of and yeah others with like the Fry Stark approach so yeah I do think there's other ones I'm actually honestly pretty excited about all of them like I think there's a lot of like techniques for example with lasso and jolt um there's like certain techniques from that that could maybe be adapted back into sp1 um that could help sp1 and like vice versa so I think it's like really

great that like and I think all these projects I mentioned are like fully open source so again my view is like the best VM that will really stand the test of time will be like fully open source and it's like really great for like the ZK community and then um I do think sp1 is like the best option out there today cuz like it just has like really great performance and it's fully customizable and things like that but in the fullness of time like for example our PR network will support sp1 it'll support lasto and drol like when Vero open source everything it can also support rero like it can support any of these options like we want to be fully modular and flexible cuz like we also know that's like the most sustain given like how fast CK progresses I know that when you released

it risk zero did have kind of a they they wrote kind of a welcome to the neighborhood tweet but also mentioned something about like performance and I know the metrics that you had shared kind of compared performance on like a certain level but they were talking about GPU I don't know what were you benchmarking on like does it matter basically what Hardware you're using how well these will perform yeah I I think one thing to say about benchmarking in general is like it's very hard to do benchmarking cuz there's it's such a multi-dimensional trade-off space it matters what Hardware you use it matters like are you benchmarking on a distributed cluster do you care about recursion like there's so many different factors like do you have your own

homegrown cluster using AWS are you using Reserve pricing or spot pricing or on demand pricing like it's just very hard to do benchmarking we really tried to do a very intellectually honest Benchmark so our Benchmark was like on CPU on the same machine just run both VMS and then just look at the amount of time it takes on the same exact same CPU just end to end run it through I think that's the easiest way to Benchmark cuz we just like compare on the exact same hardware and you just like look at the total time I think they were saying basically that like they have like a GPU implementation and on GPU it's like faster whatever it has better performance that was just like not really in the scope of our Benchmark if

that makes sense um and there's like certain Arguments for or against gpus like for example they they're harder to get in the cloud because there's all these like crazy AI companies that really like gpus today um GPU is also something we're kind of thinking about potentially adding to py 3 like maybe it'd be awesome to have it it is just really hard to Benchmark totally Apples to Apples and I think they were just saying oh like we've spent a lot of time on GPU so like you know we just want to like let people know that like that's like an option for example it's just going back to the Prov Marketplace thing because it's almost like because hardware and like how what you're running these proving nodes on seems to matter so it's like there's the Prov Marketplace there's the demand for

the Prov Marketplace and then there's the hardware powering the Prov Marketplace do you have any sort of Hardware play or are you just sort of like well there's CPUs gpus and apparently there's an an Asic now but like are you just going to say like whatever Hardware is there we're going to go with or do you want to influence that does that is that sort of outside the scope of the prover Network I think yeah the idea of the pr network is like any hardware provider can participate so like maybe for example like the idea is like we'll support a variety of different proof systems and a variety of different VMS right and then we'll also support like any hardware provider and like our marketplace network will just be like this coordination layer where

like the two parties can like talk to each other and communicate and participate in this like competitive auction or whatever so I kind of view it similar to how like you know how ethereum provides this like layer for like the rollups to compete and like a bunch of different rollups have made like really different choices in many different dimensions and then ethereum just sits in the middle and like coordinates like all the users and all the rollups and that activity like that's kind of how I view our Network it's like our Network that sits in the middle there's like Hardware providers on one side there's like applications using a bunch of different proof systems and a bunch of different VMS on the other side and we sit in the middle and just like help coordinate that activity so for us for example where we see like

a gap in the market we'll step up to fill it in so like with the VM landscape we saw like that okay there was this lack of an open source performing VM so that's why we made sp1 to just like induce demand for this network because it's like well no one's going to ever use the network if like there's no good options for VMS you know um and like similarly I think if was with one day we're like oh like there's no good Hardware providers like maybe we have to like try to like jump start that we would will um but we have like no current plans for that and I I actually do think there's a lot of really great Hardware teams so I'm like really excited about like potentially some of them even like you know trying to accelerate sp1 or like maybe even

someone external doing like the GPU thing for sp1 like that'd be awesome yeah I'm trying to imagine if you would like would you partner with Hardware or is that just like provs can choose their hardware and you wouldn't have any say on that I kind of think if you're going to go for like the decentralized Network it's actually quite hard to pick one particular type of Hardware like you really do need to actually have enough of a substrate that it's like anyone anyone can plug in provided they meet some standards uh I kind of think having to for be one particular Hardware platform makes it like kind of hard to bootstrap in a lot of ways especially if the tasks

have very different compute costs right like the aggregation proofs might be cheap relative to the full block proof right no 100% yeah we I don't think like we' have to partner with a hardware provider it's like come hook in and like play in the marketplace you know like that's kind of the goal is it's like fully permissionless fully open decentralized like I think that's like the beauty of crypto like you don't have to have to issue some points oh no proving points not yet proving points Pro points I actually think by the way a very tiny tiny again as side I actually think one of the best ideas that hasn't been done and actually is really good for using ZK is doing

Point systems that are like loot boxes where you don't know how many points you get and like you get a zkp that like some particular calculation was done to generate how many points you should get for participating but it's like a ZK loot it actually is ZK not just sync you really you really want it to like hide yeah because I actually think you're like you turn the point systems into a lot more of like a lottery game and like I don't know people people love that you know yeah I think they weirdly find that more fair chance I I definitely think it's more fair in some ways right and it also would be public the methodology is public because it's like this ZK you can read the ZK circuit doing it but it uses some provable Randomness that can't be

pure Casino I love it I mean it is but these Point systems are like casinos where you don't know whether the Casino floors will like suddenly be pulled under you right like you it is little bit there is some risk right I mean look I think there is a lot of there a lot of pros of these Point systems because they actually help the teams design QA test their their application and they help the teams design which actions they want to reward and not reward and figure that out iteratively instead of like okay we're only going to reward liquidity and like we can't change it ever it's immutable forever um you know which which in 2020 made sense but I think now that the existence of industrial airdrop farming is there you kind of have to now

have more levers at hand but anyway I think the the ZK Point systems actually has product Market fit like tomorrow if someone builts it yeah someone should build that yeah someone should build it and then use the marketplace to generate the proofs although wait okay question about the marketplace this has also come up when you have these Pro or marketplaces doesn't it also screw up privacy like can you keep things private if other thing like you're sending data to the pro Network to make proofs like I think it makes a lot of sense in the succinct context the succinctness like or the you know verifiable like making sure that it's it's correct but it doesn't yeah so that's what I've heard

like you have to FH eyes it and then you ZK it h well for privacy I think basically the end game looks like this you generate a really large proof client side so basically you do like some client side proving so there's this like Pro verifier trade-off where if your verification time is large your proof time can be a lot shorter and so like you basically generate this like really long verification short Pro or time proof client side and then you go to the proof of marketplace and you wrap that proof so and then you like compress it and make it succinct and then you turn it into something you can use on chain so I actually do think the marketplace is still useful for privacy applications because of this like wrapping stuff

wrapping and aggregation stuff I kind of want to know what's next for succinct but I also sort of want to know what you think is just next in ZK because you're moving very quickly through these use cases and I'm like what is Uma thinking about now yeah I'm well I think with sp1 like I I mean I tweeted about this but I really feel like it's this like gp4 moment of Z okay because I think the really cool thing about it is like it finally has like the correct shape like I really strongly believe and this is probably non-consensus like that every single application will use ZK in some form in

the future like everyone will be a ZK rollup like every bridge will be a ZK Bridge every Oracle will be a ZK Oracle and I think all of them are going to use ZK by writing normal rust or like normal code and then proving it on a ZK VM hopefully sp1 but you know whatever is the best open source VM and then like coordinating on this like Prov Network Marketplace to get like the cheapest possible proofs like I feel like that to me is like the endgame of ZK and it's really exciting to see like all the hype around sp1 cuz like even in our telegram like support group or like just the number of things people can do is so great now like literally today some guy

was like oh I implemented like some black SCH stuff using sp1 and that was just like not something something that would be possible with a circuit like running a circuit was like so horrible and so I really hope sp1 like catalyzes this like wave of like any developer can now use ZK it's like really similar to gbd4 because like before gbd4 to do AI you had to like do all this complicated stuff you had to fine-tune these models you had to have all these expertise like I was like I was in that era I was pre gb4 I was like doing all that stuff and then now with gbd4 it's like anyone who's like a software engineer who can make an API call I mean like you don't even have to like be a software engineer you can just make an API call and use AI

like that's awesome to to be to be fair though the people building gp4 are still doing all the Dark Art hyper Prim oh yeah yeah yeah the people building gp4 are doing dark arts yeah I agree and like similar to that like we built sp1 and we had to like go through some pain you know like it was very hard to build sp1 but now that we've built it it's like anyone can use it any developer can write rust and get a proof and that to me is really exciting cuz like even I just seen internally using it is like magical like stuff that used to take us months now it takes an afternoon there's like people in our support group and finally I can just be like oh you don't even have to ask me questions you can just like go write normal Co like it's

it's so awesome and so like I'm just really excited cuz now I'm just like okay like let's take sp1 let's get like ZK embedded in every single app like every single roll up every single Bridge like whatever it's like now so easy and then let's build like this network to kind of like be the host hosting and structure layer of it all so yeah I think we're just like focused on that like hopefully like this brings back like you know the ZK bull market or whatever cuz it's like now anyone can do anything with it so it's awesome I'm telling you the ZK bull market only comes back when you have ZK points hilarious how big is the team uh it's still pretty small yeah it's like 10 people but we are hiring okay what's next for the company It's Like You

released this but what is your next steps so we are hiring cuz I do think we're like we do need more people to like help build all this stuff um and yeah I think for us like it's just like let's take sp1 and like let's make it production ready like get onchain verification like you know get it audited whatever like make it faster make it more performance um and then also like start building this like prover Network um where like hopefully sp1 can be hosted and like if there when other open source VMS come out and like honestly hopefully they're faster cuz I think that will just induce demand for more proofs like integrate those into our Network and like basically just start generating a lot of proofs um so

yeah I think that's just like our plan is like make sp1 faster and then build out the pro Network and yeah make sure that like all the proof that are getting generated by like you know for the cheapest price possible yeah is it all ZK VMS could like any of those rollups use it could any of like I'm just trying to imagine who your customers could be for that Prov Network yeah I mean the way we're we're going to build a Prov network is to support any like proof system and evm so like it could be exting rups could use it yeah new ZK rollups can use it Bridges could like anyone using ZK can use it because it'll be like this very general modular thing like it'll be like Hardware providers

can opt into like which who they want to like provide proofs for and then like on the other side like if you're an application like you can just submit you just be like hey these are my binaries these are the things I want to run this is like the proof I want generated so it's it's very general like anyone can use it cool TR you any last thoughts nope excited to see what people build and like I said if you're ever thinking about building ZK points with sp1 let me know because I have I have so many ideas for this I have so many ideas wow that's so funny I love it it's good I think the the you got write got to write a tweet about this the ZK Market just needs some dgen energy and I feel like sp1 makes it easier to have DJ

energy so no I agree yeah any DJ can now do ZK it's true wow all right um thank you so much for coming back on the show and sharing with us all of these products all of these projects and how they all relate yeah thanks for having me it's been fun thanks for coming on and uh obviously super excited to see where this ends up yeah no good to chat with you guys I also want to say thank you to the podcast team Rachel Henrik and Tanya and to our listeners thanks for [Music] listening