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Succinct Attestation Network

The security model of Succinct State Queries

Succinct Attestation Network

The Succinct state query protocol is secured by the attestors in the Succinct network. The attestors can be thought of as very lightweight nodes in a network that are responsible for processing state query results, computing the result, and signing attestations. If at least 2/3s of attestors have signed a state query's result, then the result is considered valid and is relayed on-chain to a desired callback.
The registry of valid attestors is maintained on Ethereum mainnet in the RegistrySource contract and mirrored on all other chains in the RegistryHandler contracts. There are 5 current attestors that are whitelisted and run by Succinct Labs and other high-reputation entities.
In the long-term, we believe that augmenting the security of our attestation network with restaking mechanisms like Eigenlayer might make sense. Read more here.

Properties of Succinct's Attestation Network

We highlight a few properties of our attestation-based security and why it was a good fit for our users.
Ability to interoperate with optimistic rollups and other optimistic systems
As optimistic rollups have taken off (Optimism, Arbitrum) and many "optimistic rollup as a service companies" that allow Dapps to spin up their own rollups have also gotten some traction, we think being able to attest to data and queries from optimistic rollups is quite important. However, one challenge with optimistic rollups is that they do not settle for 7 days, due to the fraud proof challenge window. Generally, requiring a 7 day delay on attestations is impractical, and a "zk proof" for shortening this 7 day period would amount to building a zk rollup (basically "zk-ifying" Optimism and Arbitrum). Thus, low-latency oracle requests from optimistic rollups require a committee-based approach.
Optimized for latency and cheap gas costs
Many developers rely on oracles to power liquidations or other very latency sensitive parts of their protocol. These developers want the lowest-possible latency for their oracle requests. While there have been tremendous leaps in zk proof technology, the proof generation time is still ultimately too slow for many use-cases. Also, verifying a zk proof is cheap, however for minimized gas costs, verifying signatures from a network is even cheaper (generally 240k gas vs. 30k gas if our network has 15 validators). Thus many developers prefer a committee based approach for minimal latency and minimal gas costs.
Generality of oracle requests & attestations
The Succinct network can attest to any view function in Solidity. If you can write the query in Solidity, our oracle network can handle it. Our committee-based solution is extremely generalized and can handle the long-tail of queries that developers want.
A simple system means less surface area for implementation bugs
Our economically accountable network has a very simple technical implementation and therefore is less liable to unforeseen bugs in practice.
How validators can join the network