TL;DR

We are partnering with Succinct to bring cheap and accessible zero-knowledge proofs to all developers. We are committed to supporting Succinct SP1 zkVM proofs generated locally or from Succinct’s prover market on NEBRA UPA. This will enable all projects and developers using Succinct’s zkVM proofs to lower their onchain verification costs by 10x or more.

How NEBRA can reduce SP1 developers’ onchain cost by 10x?

Succinct is building SP1, an open-source, RISC-V zkVM with state-of-the-art performance that is useful for rollups, bridges, and other blockchain applications. Developing zero-knowledge proof-based protocols used to be notoriously difficult, as developers needed to learn and express their logic using very exotic constraint satisfaction languages, such as Circom, or write the circuits in raw form using embedded DSLs like Halo2’s circuit writing libraries.

With RISC-V zkVMs such as Succinct SP1, developers now only need to write programs in familiar languages, such as Rust. This is a significant breakthrough for those building any proof-based infrastructures and applications, such as bridging, co-processors, and zkRollups.

The last mile of the SP1 developers’ journey is settling the proof onchain. Today, the onchain proof verification cost is prohibitive: developers need to spend more than 250,000 gas, which is equivalent to 20 US dollars on Ethereum or 2 dollars on Ethereum L2s.

NEBRA UPA is the first Universal Proof Aggregation protocol that scales and composes zero-knowledge proof verification on Ethereum/EVM chains. NEBRA UPA achieves this using recursive SNARKs .

There are 3 key properties of NEBRA UPA:

• Universality: NEBRA UPA can aggregate proofs from any circuit. This means that in the same batch, NEBRA UPA aggregates proofs from different sources, such as zkEVMs, zkDIDs, and zkCoprocessors. Universality brings an "economy of scale" to NEBRA users, allowing them to enjoy cheap amortized verification costs without needing to generate a huge number of proofs.
• Permissionless: NEBRA UPA is an onchain protocol, meaning that anyone can submit proofs to NEBRA.
• Censorship resistance: NEBRA UPA is censorship resistant by adopting a forced-inclusion design similar to Ethereum L2s. You can trigger a forced inclusion to include your proofs if our off-chain worker refuses to put your proof in the aggregated proof. Additionally, we would be slashed if a forced inclusion occurs.

By using NEBRA UPA, SP1 developers can lower their proof verification costs from 250,000 gas to roughly 18,000 gas, translating to approximately 10x onchain verification cost savings.

Why Succinct SP1?

There are many reasons that developers should use SP1:

• SP1 is the zkVM with a complete feature set that includes precompiles, SOTA (state-of-the-art) performance, and Rust standard library support.
• SP1 has state of the art performance with precompiles already supported (keccak, sha, signature verification) leading to 5-10x cycle reduction on real-world workloads. In practice, this can be 30x cheaper and faster than competing VMs.
• SP1 has open source constraints that are essential for security and auditability, and allow for adding precompiles to accelerate any workload.

SP1 will be integrated with Succinct’s upcoming prover network, providing developers with a more streamlined experience and lower prover costs.