Paradigm-backed startup Succinct and OP Labs aim to solve ZK rollups
2024-09-12

Paradigm-backed startup Succinct Labs announced Wednesday that it has been working with OP Labs, the main contributor to the Optimism protocol, in an effort to "solve" ZK rollups.
"Over the past few months, we collaborated closely with the OP Labs' team to build OP Succinct, a seamless way to upgrade any OP Stack chain to use [zero-knowledge proofs] in 1 hour," Succinct said in a post to X. 
Optimism is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum that aims to provide faster and cheaper transactions while maintaining the security and compatibility of the Ethereum mainnet. It uses optimistic rollups to bundle multiple transactions into a single one, reducing the load on the Ethereum network, which leads to lower transaction fees and quicker processing times. 
Succinct Labs, which raised $55 million in a seed and Series A funding round led by Paradigm in March, said its new approach is significantly faster than "standard optimistic rollups," which have a "7-day fraud proof window," and costs "tenths of a cent per transaction" on average.
"OP Succinct was built in close collaboration with OP Labs. From day one, the OP Labs team built the OP Stack to be modular and have a path to supporting a variety of validity mechanisms (not just optimistic fault proofs)," Succinct said in a blog post. "OP Succinct’s two-step integration requires minimal code and easily fits into existing deployments–including rollup-as-a-service setups."
Scaling solutions
Layer 2 scaling solutions have been created in order to address the issues of scalability and transaction speed that hamper Layer 1 blockchains. Rollups are one choice among the available Layer 2 solutions and include zero-knowledge rollups, or ZK rollups.
ZK rollups use cryptographic proofs to verify the validity of batched transactions off-chain. This method eliminates the need for a dispute period, providing faster transaction finality and lower gas costs than optimistic rollups.
In June, OP Labs released fault proofs on the Layer 2 blockchain OP Mainnet. The fault proof system allows for ether and ERC-20 token withdrawals from OP Mainnet without the need for trusted third parties, which enables users to challenge and remove invalid withdrawals. Fault proofs serve as a mechanism for Ethereum Layer 2 networks, allowing users to contest potentially fraudulent or incorrect transactions.
Previously, OP Mainnet did not have fault proofs, which meant users were required to trust operators to submit accurate state roots onto the mainnet.
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