🎥 New fireside chat: Inside SP1 with @tamirhemo, Head of Cryptography at @SuccinctLabs. We dive deep into SP1’s architecture, performance breakthroughs, and what it takes to secure production-grade ZK-VMs. Timestamps: 0:00 What is SP1 and Succinct’s mission 2:31 Why ZK-VMs are more general than bespoke ZK circuits 3:30 Hypercube & real-time proving in EthProofs 4:30 Design decisions behind SP1’s performance gains 7:36 Theory vs arithmetization tradeoffs 10:19 SP1 attack surfaces & mitigations 14:04 Interactive theorem provers vs SMT tools (Picus) 15:36 Tooling integration & what’s still missing 18:18 Precompiles: when to add them & security impact 20:24 Is “compile-to-circuit” a useful dual to ZK-VMs? 21:12 Prover guarantees, deployment, and privacy risks 24:04 Incremental proving: local + server proofs 26:14 Proofs vs conjectures & cryptographic prioritization 29:23 New cryptography & what excites Tamir most 32:01 Applications building on SP1 34:45 Prover network vs private proving services 36:55 Timeline for at-home proving for 99% of blocks 39:34 The hardest 1%: 12-second bottlenecks 42:08 Adversarial blocks & “prover-killer” opcodes 43:18 Beyond Ethereum: other SP1 workloads 45:16 What’s next for SP1 47:15 Closing remarks Hosted by @bensepanski from @VeridiseInc, filmed in Buenos Aires, 17 Nov 2025 🇦🇷 Video recap below 🧵 1/5

Tamir explains why Succinct moved from bespoke ZK circuits to a general-purpose ZK-VM, and why SP1 is precompile-centric: optimized circuits where it matters, flexible programs everywhere else. The goal isn’t proving every cycle — SP1 proves the program’s promised behavior. 2/5

🚀 Performance highlights SP1 Hypercube now proves ~99.7% of Ethereum blocks under 12s with ~16 GPUs — reaching the threshold for consumer-grade hardware. Key unlocks: multilinear polynomials, better arithmetization freedom, and removing recursion bottlenecks. 3/5

Security is front and center. Tamir walks through how attack surfaces are mitigated, prover-killer opcodes, and why formal verification is essential for ZK-VMs. @SuccinctLabs works with @VeridiseInc to formally verify SP1 circuits using Picus to eliminate bugs before they ship. 4/5