Succinct ties up with Tandem

Offchain Labs is making a zero-knowledge play for Arbitrum. 

Its venture studio Tandem has entered a one-year exclusive partnership with Succinct to build a zkVM tailored to the Arbitrum ecosystem.

The agreement, announced Tuesday, binds both companies to collaborate solely with each other on this effort. “For one year, Tandem by Offchain Labs has an exclusive commercial agreement with Succinct to create zkVM for Arbitrum chains,” an Offchain Labs spokesperson told Blockworks. 

The team declined to comment on whether the partnership represents an all-cash deal, or includes token swaps. The Succinct Foundation, launched its PROVE token earlier this month.

This partnership accelerates Offchain Labs’ broader strategy around zero-knowledge proving. CEO Steven Goldfeder previously described ZK technology as not yet competitive with optimistic proving “in terms of speed cost and maturity.”

But this is starting to change, Goldfeder said in an interview with Bankless. “It’s not available quite yet, but particularly for those building on the Orbit stack, they should be aware that they will soon be able to choose to add ZK proofs to their chain.”

Succinct brings to the table its Rust‑based SP1 zkVM and the Succinct Prover Network — now live on mainnet — designed to make zero-knowledge proofs both accessible and performant for developers. Its technology already underpins dozens of deployments across the industry, including Celestia, Across, Avail, Mantle and Polygon. 

“We’re convinced that every rollup will use ZK,” said Succinct CEO Uma Roy. “Serving Arbitrum chains is a top priority.”

Rather than converting Arbitrum One into a zk-rollup outright, the partnership is focused on giving the Arbitrum DAO — as well as Orbit chains — a credible ZK upgrade path. “We’re building the scaffolding,” Goldfeder said. “It’s up to deployers or the DAO to adopt it.”

Tandem’s Head, Ira Auerbach, emphasized how modular ZK proving can dramatically shrink settlement times — from days to minutes — enhancing capital efficiency, UX, and operational complexity. 

“[Succinct’s] approach is directly aligned with our vision of how Arbitrum and the broader blockchain ecosystem can evolve,” Auerbach said.

This integration is only one piece of Offchain Labs’ modular stack push, having already signaled interest in hybrid proving models combining ZK fast paths with optimistic fallback as well as native ZK settlement. 

Together with the recent the ZeroDev acquisition, the Succinct pact reflect Offchain Labs’ expanding quest to unify developer tooling and cryptographic infrastructure across its stack. For Succinct, the deal grants direct access to the largest rollup ecosystem on Ethereum and an opportunity to standardize its modular ZK infrastructure across Orbit chains.

Tandem previously backed infrastructure teams like Espresso Systems, Fhenix and Xai. The partnership focuses on both engineering and distribution: Succinct will lead development of high-performance proving infrastructure and a decentralized prover network, while Tandem provides ecosystem alignment, funding, and go-to-market support.

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