ZK light clients: the convergence

ZK light clients are where the ZK track and the interop track collide. The idea: instead of verifying a full light client on the destination chain, prove light client execution inside a SNARK and verify the SNARK.

Suddenly you can run an Ethereum sync committee verification on a chain that could never afford it natively. Projects like Succinct's Telepathy, Electron Labs, and Polyhedra have shipped production versions of this pattern for Ethereum and Cosmos source chains.

The cost tradeoff is prover time on the relayer side versus verifier gas on the destination side, and the trend is clearly toward the prover winning as zkVMs get faster. The long-term thesis is that every serious message passing layer - LayerZero DVNs, Hyperlane ISMs, even Wormhole - will eventually run a ZK light client option as the default high-security tier.