In this episode of Blocklayer Podcast, Kenzi Takahashi and Diksha Desai sit down with Uma Roy, Co-Founder of Succinct Labs, to unpack why zero-knowledge proofs are becoming one of the most important primitives in crypto — for both scalability and privacy.

Uma shares her path into Web3 and the motivations behind building Succinct Labs, including how the team formed and grew in San Francisco with a strong preference for in-person collaboration. We talk about what ZK actually enables beyond “faster chains,” the practical tradeoffs teams face when they adopt proof systems, and why developer tooling is the real unlock for mainstream ZK adoption.

Uma also goes deep on SP1 — a ZK virtual machine — covering the hardest engineering challenges they hit while building it and the solutions they developed to make ZK systems more u ...