From 0 to ZK Concept Bites #5: Succinctness In our last Concept Bite, we talked about when the "zero knowledge" property actually matters for privacy. But privacy is only one of ZK's two superpowers. The other, succinctness, is the one Brevis uses in almost every integration we ship. 🚀 Succinctness means a proof is dramatically smaller than the computation it proves. Process 100,000 transactions, and the resulting proof is a few kilobytes. Verify a full Ethereum block's execution, and the proof fits in a single on-chain call. The size of the proof stays roughly constant no matter how heavy the original workload was. Here's where it gets interesting. Generating a proof actually costs more than just running the computation itself, because the prover has to perform additional cryptographic operations on top of the raw execution. But verifying that proof costs almost nothing by comparison. The relationship looks like this: Proving > Execution >> Verification. That cost structure is exactly what blockchains need. Today, every Ethereum transaction gets re-executed by hundreds of thousands of validators independently, the same work repeated across the entire network. With succinct proofs, one party does the heavy lifting and produces a compact proof. Everyone else just checks it. The network goes from "everyone does everything" to "compute once, verify everywhere." 📜 This is why Brevis can offer things like historical data queries for PancakeSwap's VIP fee tiers, or billion-token reward distributions for Linea, without blowing up gas costs. The computation happens off-chain where it's cheap. The proof lands on-chain where verification is fixed and affordable regardless of how much data was crunched behind the scenes. Succinctness is also why Pico Prism's real-time Ethereum block proving works at all. Proving an entire block's execution and compressing it into something a smart contract can verify in milliseconds would be pointless if the proof itself were as large as the block data. The compression ratio is what makes the whole model viable. Read Part 2: