How Will Space and Time’s USDC Payments Change ZK Coprocessing, And Why Now

The news and what is actually changing

Space and Time says developers can now pay for zero knowledge coprocessing with USDC, a stablecoin issued by regulated affiliates of Circle. The company says the network will accept USDC and convert it to SXT, the network token used inside the protocol. The development coincides with Space and Time’s recent mainnet launch.

\ Scott Dykstra, Co-Founder and CTO of Space and Time, said,

Space and Time positions its Proof of SQL system as a coprocessor that can prove SQL queries against large datasets and then deliver those results to smart contracts. The project’s documentation and codebase describe online latencies and sub-second targets on benchmarked workloads.

\ Stablecoins account for most crypto transfer value today. Chainalysis reports that stablecoins represent more than two thirds of recent cryptocurrency transaction value. Visa’s onchain analytics show that after filtering out inorganic flows, the last 30 days of adjusted stablecoin volume still total in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and that retail sized transfers remain a small slice of activity. This indicates that stablecoins are already the unit of account for larger settlement flows and treasury activity in Web3.

\ Brian Schultz, Vice President, Corporate Development and Circle Ventures at Circle, said,

\ USDC’s footprint has expanded in 2025. Circle’s annual report cites a 78 percent year over year increase in USDC circulation in 2024, and third party trackers show current issuance around the low to mid seventy billions across chains. This context explains why a developer platform would add USDC as a payment rail.

\ Developers already hold stablecoins to fund operations, pay contributors, and manage DAO treasuries. Industry datasets and reports point to stablecoins taking a large share of DeFi collateral and treasury mixes, which reduces currency mismatch when paying for services. Accepting USDC aligns a compute network with how builders actually move funds onchain.

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What a ZK coprocessor does, explained with an example

A coprocessor moves heavy computation off the base chain, proves the result with a zero knowledge proof, and returns only a compact proof and output to a contract. Imagine an onchain game that needs to check a player’s activity across one million past transactions. Doing that onchain is not practical. A coprocessor reads the data offchain, runs the query, generates a proof, and the contract verifies the proof before updating state.

\ Verification is the onchain step that consumes gas. On Ethereum today, verifying a Groth16 proof with a small number of public inputs typically costs around two hundred thousand gas because of the pairing precompiles that Ethereum exposes. Independent write ups and protocol blogs put the order of magnitude near that level, and optimizations or different schemes shift costs up or down.

\ Space and Time’s Proof of SQL targets SQL queries, not general bytecode. The project says it can prove aggregates over millions of rows at online latencies, then feed a proof to smart contracts. That design competes with zkVM based systems that prove arbitrary programs, which can be more flexible but may have different latency and cost profiles.

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How Space and Time compares with other coprocessing options

RISC Zero’s Bonsai markets a proving service and API that can scale with parallel proofs, targeting enterprise workloads and zkVM programs. Succinct’s SP1 is a zkVM and network where developers write Rust and compile to RISC-V, and public benchmarks highlight progress on proof times and GPU provers. Lagrange offers a coprocessor that pre-processes chain data into a verifiable database and runs proofs across a distributed prover network, and it has disclosed funding and operator sets. Together these projects show a field moving toward modular offchain compute that returns zk proofs onchain. (RISC Zero)

Axiom focuses on historical Ethereum state access and computes over that data, and documents how smart contracts can request verified reads and computation for reflection over chain history. This is a narrower, data centric path that many DeFi and governance use cases need. Space and Time instead emphasizes SQL over mixed onchain and offchain sources. These are different product choices, and buyers will map them to their data and latency needs.

\ When a platform accepts USDC for usage, it reduces one source of friction, because builders do not have to swap treasury assets to a platform token before they run jobs. Space and Time still uses SXT inside the protocol, but the USDC front door meets teams where their funds already sit. That is the tangible change for developers.

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The cost model, with a transparent calculation

Consider a contract that verifies one Groth16 proof with three public inputs. Multiple sources estimate around two hundred thousand gas for verification. If the average gas price is between one and three gwei, a range that Etherscan’s tracker has shown in 2025 at times, the onchain verification would cost roughly 0.0002 ETH to 0.0006 ETH. At an ETH price of four thousand five hundred dollars, that is about ninety cents to two dollars seventy per verification. This is only the verification step, not the offchain proving service fee that a coprocessor charges, which is priced by the provider and now payable in USDC on Space and Time.

\ On layer two networks, verification costs can be lower in dollar terms because gas price is lower and ETH is bridged, so developers often place the verifier on an L2, then settle security to Ethereum through the rollup. The USDC payment change does not alter the gas math, it only changes how a developer funds the offchain component.

\ If a team batches many user actions into one proof, or uses proof aggregation, the amortized verification cost per user action decreases. Research and provider docs show aggregation strategies that trade proving time for smaller onchain costs, which can be important for consumer scale apps.

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Market timing and risk factors

The stablecoin market is growing, and USDC’s circulation has been rising through 2025. Circle went public in June 2025, and public filings and coverage show that USDC growth is now a core driver of Circle’s revenue profile. This indicates durable institutional focus on stablecoin rails.

\ Policy remains a key variable. The Bank of England has floated caps on stablecoin holdings for users and businesses, while the United States is moving toward clearer federal frameworks. Any restriction that limits stablecoin usage would change the total addressable market for developer payments in stablecoins. Platforms that depend on one stablecoin must monitor jurisdictional rules and distribution channels.

\ The ZK coprocessor category is competitive. Many vendors publish performance claims, and numbers can vary by circuit, hardware, and workload. Teams should test against their own queries, data sizes, and latency budgets, rather than relying on marketing benchmarks alone. Public docs for Groth16 verification help set a baseline for the onchain piece, but the offchain proving time and price are provider specific.

Funding and ecosystem signal

Space and Time has raised capital from Microsoft’s M12 and later investors, with reporting and investor pages listing Circle Ventures among participants. Circle’s venture arm invests across infrastructure and applications that expand USDC use. The payment integration aligns with that portfolio logic.

\ Stablecoin payment features are also appearing across DeFi, exchanges, and custody platforms. McKinsey’s 2025 analysis frames tokenized cash and stablecoins as a driver for cross border payments and treasury operations. The direction of travel suggests compute networks will keep adding stablecoin based pricing and settlement.

\ Developers should track whether USDC payment reduces churn at the start of a build. Signs would include faster time to first proof, lower failed job rates due to funding issues, and fewer swaps in transaction logs when funding coprocessor accounts. Those are measurable outcomes.

Final Outlook

USDC payments for ZK coprocessing are a practical step. Teams that hold stablecoins can start without managing a platform token position, and that removes one step in a build. The conversion to SXT inside the protocol still preserves the project’s token model, and it keeps accounting internal to Space and Time.

\ The open question is not whether USDC is convenient, it is whether developers can show end to end latency and cost that fits real applications. The market has many coprocessor options, and the winner will be the platform that gives predictable latency, transparent pricing, and clean developer ergonomics across chains.

\ This news connects two trends: stablecoins as operating capital and zero-knowledge coprocessing as infrastructure. The combination fits how teams ship smart contracts today. The evidence to watch is not just payment choice adoption, it is the number of production apps that rely on verifiable data paths, the frequency of proofs per day, and the unit economics per proof verified onchain.

\ If those metrics trend up while developer setup steps trend down, USDC payments will have been more than a billing change. It will have been a change in how on-chain compute is budgeted and consumed.

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:::tip This author is an independent contributor publishing via our business blogging program. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYO

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