Ship a network that is built to last. Decentralised from day 1 — controlled by the community. Aztec's community launched the Ignition chain of Aztec on Ethereum main-net at 1am last night. The future is here and it is private.

There is a hidden elephant in the room for privacy chains. And no, it's not regulation. It's a far simpler question. How do you query for your balance, when everything is encrypted? Let's explore the elephant in the room when it comes to privacy chains. ↓🧶

◈ 7 Years ago, I created Aztec's original logo. It was a play on zero knowledge. An outer privacy shield wrapping secret data. Since then, @Zac_Aztec and I have poured everything into building programmable privacy. Today, our new brand reflects the scale of our ambition. Our tech brings Aztec to life. The brand ensures it’s remembered. Say hello to the next Renaissance on Aztec. Join me at the Townhall discord.gg/aztec ◈

1/ Today we are announcing Aztec's Series A round lead by @paradigm. Read on to hear the juicy details.

Ethereum storage proofs. Proved in a snark. In a web browser. It’s slow, but soon ™️ will be fast. You can use this to: prove ownership, solvency without revealing your wallets, voting preferences you name it. No more FTX’s. Private on chain voting. The sky is the limit.

Every modern passport and ID card has a digital signature and private key in it. 121 counties and counting. This signature is signed by the issuing government and can be used to prove you have a real valid passport. The passport chip even contains a photo signed by the government. The zk passport team are working on doing on device face detection and proving a liveness check against the person holding the phone. 🤯 And yes all of this can be proven inside s clients side zero knowledge proof. Welcome to the age of privacy preserving identity checks.

Our incredible team has just shipped Aztec's Public Testnet. Why does this matter? History has shown time and again we can't trust ourselves. Especially when it comes to global markets, elections or currencies. We don't need tools to endlessly scale block space. Society needs tools that enable us to trust each other in a digital world. Tools that protect societies from human tendencies of greed and corruption. These tools will create demand for block space via new categories of applications: private DeFi, decentralized governance and social systems where people can prove facts about themselves without exposing their data. These tools are trust infrastructure. So what is trust infrastructure? 1. A consensus layer to decide what happened. 2. An execution environment with programable privacy built into the heart of every transaction. 3. A fully decentralised network controlled by no single entity. This is what we have shipped at @aztecnetwork for our public Testnet: Aztec is a zk rollup that posts validity proofs and all data to Ethereum. Aztec inherits the full economic security of Ethereum's >$600Bn of staked capital for finalised transactions. Aztec is the only feature complete execution environment. Private execution, composability, private state, account abstraction and fee abstraction and more. Aztec enables developers to build applications that are impossible on public blockchains. The applications that society needs to enable trust. Aztec is a fully decentralised rollup. Decentralised sequencing, decentralised proving, decentralised governance and a 100% open source code base. Anyone can participate. This is not a pipe dream, it exists today. And now Aztec needs you. Run a node. Build the applications that blockchains were meant for.

Privacy is not EVM compatible 🥱

Remember Aztec Connect? It was really freaking cool – you could bridge privacy to any L1 DeFi protocol. However it was not without some issues... 🧶

Whilst building @aztecnetwork, I have seen hundreds of token launches. Everything from the initial hype, the distribution & incentives to the creation of an asset, all fail to do the one thing they are supposed to, decentralise. Token launches are still broken in 2025. Airdrops are farmed. Token sales are dominated by sophisticated bidders or gas wars. And fair price discovery does non-existent. There are certain inflection points in life where you can pick the easy path, or the hard path. For the $AZTEC token launch, there wasn’t any other option. Launching a network that is designed to power privacy for all of Web3 via centralised rails was a non-starter and against everything Aztec is built to fix. So we took a different path – a path that actually uses blockchains for what they were built for. A path with a simple ethos – be fair, open and transparent. Do everything possible on-chain. The $AZTEC launch puts our community first. It lays the foundation for the next decade of private transactions and decentralises ownership, governance and economics from day 1. To get there we had to solve two problems: 1. Distribution mechanics 2. Global access (while preventing Sybills and enforcing sanctions compliance) For distribution mechanics, we partnered with the amazing team at @Uniswap on the new continuous clearing auction format (CCA). The CCA ensures fair access, reduces gas wars and promotes real price discovery. Aztec’s CCA auction has a floor price $350M and will sell up to 14.95% of the Total Supply using transparent on-chain clearing directly on Ethereum mainnet. A further 2.64% of the network is then automatically allocated through community participation to a Uniswap V4 pool at the final clearing price. Enabling liquidity for network operators. Aztec’s CCA auction uses hooks to make two additions – a community whitelist that enables pre-bids and sanctions compliance using @ZKPassport and @0xPredicate. The whitelist ensures our community gets exclusive access to bidding ahead of the first day of the auction. ZkPassport, lets you do privacy preserving sanctions checks directly with a smart contract. Your identity data never leaves your phone and your passport information can’t be lost in a data breach. The future is here and it's going to be private. I would like to thank all the teams that helped us get here. Aztec’s investors for making this possible @a16zcrypto, @paradigm, @consensys, @join_ef and many more. Finally, thank you to our community for believing in a different path. Challenge the status quo. The ticker is $AZTEC.

Sneak peak of new zk.money UI. Built with @aztecnetwork's SDK. Private by default 10-30x gas savings L1 Liquidity Social Recovery Coming soon ™️

@aztecnetwork — the last rollup

GM to all privacy enjoyers.

Aztec is being created as a decentralised network. It's design, code, and operators are shaped by it's community. @aztecnetwork has launched an RFP for a key part of the network design - sequencer selection. Anon - will you answer the call?

Most projects treat decentralisation as a future problem. At Aztec, we designed for it from day 0. It's been a long journey to designing a robust decentralised network, and today we’re one step closer to programmable privacy on Ethereum. Aztec is now running a permissionless, decentralized sequencer & prover network. So what's cool about that? Our team has built a test network that is sequenced, proven and governed by the community. And it works. The community just passed a governance upgrade to enable test transactions and automated slashing, the last step ahead of Public Testnet. If you’re a node operator, home staker, or just someone who cares deeply about decentralising bleeding edge use cases — join the Aztec sequencer community ahead of the Public Testnet launch!

1/12 Every decade the internet has been transformed by improvements in encryption. It's happening again. Right now. The next wave will reshape the worlds economies and financial systems. 🧵 How?

1/5 Aztec would like to create a working group to increase Geth's txMaxSize from 128kb to at least 512kb. Motivation: help zkRollups scale and keep data on chain for maximum security and liveness of zkrollups.

It’s an honour to work alongside you.

Private KYC verification is here. Using this flow you can verify you have done KYC with Coinbase anywhere. On @base, on @ethereum or on @aztecnetwork . All in 41 lines of Noir code and proven in seconds. Privacy is coming.

This article is another Vitalik masterpeice. It hammers home why we have spent the last 7 years building at Aztec. "Supporting privacy for everyone, and making the necessary tools open source, universal, reliable and safe is one of the important challenges of our time" Every member of our team is working night and day to execute on this vision. A fully decentralised and credibly neutral privacy layer for Ethereum. The world needs privacy. The tech is ready. Which side of history will you be on?

It’s still mind blowing to me that we can read data from a passports NFC chip, and ask the private key inside any e passport to sign a message. Watching this team ship zero knowledge proofs of passport has been a joy. Voting, stable coins, and identity are all going to change in 2025. Which country will be first?

From zkEVM's to privacy VM's — Ethereum is going mainstream with ZK L2's. Companies compete over features and TPS on t̶w̶i̶t̶t̶e̶r̶, but the echo chamber is quiet on the security of these systems. Enter: BLS Training Wheels — Mitigate ZK bugs with Consensus. 🧶 (Idea Thread)

Read it again. The private contract never exists in Aztecs state. You can execute any program you can think of with the full power of Ethereum. No gas limits, just prove it. Propriety algorithms ✅ Machine Learning ✅ Sensitive business flows ✅ Off chain apps can now use ethereums consensus to execute anything….

We are so back. Aztec’s engineers have been working tirelessly to confirmed the work of Sukbae Lee et al. We have successfully reproduced the phase transition from PB to a ~stable zkSNARK Early benchmarks — provable in linear time at room temperature and pressure. A 🧵

Noir Gud @NoirLang @Zac_Aztec

Today we unveiled the road to Aztec main-net. This is the culmination of years of shipping and iterating on privacy rollups. We have learnt with each successive version of Aztec what it takes to bring privacy to market. My most important learnings: 1. Privacy must be by default. 2. Privacy must be programmable. 3. Privacy must not be controlled by anyone — it must be pure cryptography running on a decentralised network to survive. 4. For a system to be properly decentralized, it must be designed that way from day one. Our roadmap highlights the core components of Aztec’s decentralized, privacy-focused network and how we will take these learnings to main-net. Check it out: aztec.network/roadmap

Adding privacy is the best way to scale Ethereum. With private execution, users execute and prove transactions locally — reducing the load on the network.

This is an unsolved problem at the cutting edge of cryptography, encryption and private blockchains. Aztec is running an RFP to advance note discovery tech. If you found the elephant, and love crpytography - get involved. Swag and kudos for submissions! forum.aztec.network/t/reques…

We just shipped the last major update to testnet before audits start and we turn our attention to mainnet. This testnet is permissionless — create a zero-knowledge proof of passport to join. This testnet is adversarial — nodes can slash misbehaving nodes. In the style of Trump: "Some validators just don’t have what it takes. They get slashed — a disgrace! My nodes are built to win. Always attesting, always proposing." ------------------------------------------------------- Do you have what it takes? Will your node survive? Let the slashing commence.

Give this a listen to hear about all things Noir, how we got here, apps that need privacy and the Aztec Testnet. Thanks for having me on, it was the most fun relaxed podcast I have done. 😃

Companies have competitors. Fact. The differences between companies creates choice for consumers — its healthy👍 Open source is the ethos that binds competitors together, for the common good 👍 Ignoring core OS principles, just to win an audience —that sucks 👎 Do better.

We love backronyms at Aztec. Fun fact. No one actually knows @Zac_Aztec ‘s real name. We just call him Zac because it stands for: Zero knowledge Aztec Creator 🤯

45 team mates flew into London for the tryouts for the Aztec team tonight. Our bench is deep.

Governance is hard — especially for truly decentralised networks. We spent the last two years iterating on Aztec's governance, staking and slashing designs. Today, our latest design was published as an RFC on the forum. Spoiler Alert: There is not a 2/3 MultiSig in sight. 🧵

Public blockchains where everyone can see everything simply don’t make sense. Devcon in Bogotá reinforces the need for privacy. We don’t walk down the street holding a sign with our net worth above our head. Get a private wallet - simply for your personal security.

The scroll team are great. First in depth discussions on sequencer decentralisation with @toghrulmaharram Now you can deploy Noir on Scroll. 🤯 We like Scroll.

Few people know, but Arnaud actually hired me into Aztec back in 2017 🫡 Although we will be in different orgs, I sleep well at night knowing the Aztec foundation is being crafted with his skillset, integrity and vision. I can't think of a better person to take on this challenge and steward the network once its live.

Private shared state is the cryptographers equivalent of a threesome. If you can give Bob and Alice what they want — apply below.

This is accurate, but it's extremely cynical. The reason most testnets are marketing stunts is because most networks are fully centralised. Core teams tried to hide this or kick the can down the road with – we will decentralise 'one day'. If you build a decentralised system; you actually need a testnet. Why? To TEST the network and its participants work as intended. Marketing isn't the issue, centralised networks are.

Yes this is a real life Goblin cannon. We use them at @aztecnetwork to accelerate proofs. Fuck ASICS.

It begins.

Zac Gud 28k constraints is a ridiculous feat of gate golfing and cryptography. The RSA signature algorithm is a core primitive used in zk -email, proof of passport and even credit cards. It’s possible to prove an RSA signature in 1-2 seconds on a new MacBook or iPhone — in the BROWSER. 🤯🤯💨🚗 A privacy revolution is coming.

Launching a privacy project takes balls, determination and lots of tireless work. Congrats @hdevalence and team 🫡 I have no affiliation or investment, just happy to see you guys make it through.

Aztec Connect is not coming back. But if you build it – Aztec Connect on steroids might. What will you build? Applications for the interop RFP are closing soon. Apply below.

CCAn't wait.

I support increasing the gas limit to 45m. That’s nearly 3mb of calldata D/A vs 0.4mb in initial 4844, and without waiting for hard forks. Rollups are hungry for call data, feed us plz devs.

How many bips is a lack of privacy costing you….

Noir dev tools now have Auto Complete. Learning Noir became even easier. Shoutout to the @NoirLang team, the improvements keep coming. 👩‍💻💻⌨️🖥️👨‍💻

We don’t need an alt L1 for payments. The tech needed for mass adoption of payments is already on Ethereum. 1. $120 billion of economic security. 2. The largest developer ecosystem 3. Privacy — without this payments are an episode of black mirror. 4. Scale — with L3s and client side execution and proving, it’s possible to process 10,000 + TPS 5. UX — account abstraction wallets that allow me to use passkeys and not think about gas.

Aztec is sponsoring the Unicode hackathon with $5,000 zkDAI for the best Aztec Connect bridge contract. You just need to know solidity to participate :) I am giving a talk at (15:00 EDT) on writing bridge contracts that enable TWAP's and private limit orders. 👀 Be there.

Are you tired of writing contracts where everyone can see everything? Do you wish you knew how to write private smart contracts? This Sunday, clear your schedule and read this. Go from being an anon to an anon wiv Aztec Skillsz in an afternoon.

Another day, another chain. Privacy is spreading.

ProverNet was the first of many tests of Aztec's decentralised block production software for our privacy L2. We had over 15 proving teams generate over 5,000 block proofs, testing their infrastructure (and ours). Proving Aztec blocks is not easy. It requires 6 different circuits that are recursively aggregated to form a block. Our fleet of 16 core provers couldn't keep up with the load and fell behind the other teams. Two of these proofs require ~90gb of ram and 32 cores. Requirements which will come down with future versions. It's been humbling to see the amazing minds within the community take up the challenge. Thank you to all those who are helping decentralise Aztec. You are bringing credibly neutral privacy to Web 3.0. Congrats to all the winners, and stay tuned for future ProverNet(s). Privacy is coming.

Awesome to see @ZKpassport is fully powered by @NoirLang for its Devon demo!

Private multi-sigs are coming. This team has been crushing it since before we launched Aztec Connect, and they are only just getting started. Thanks for building a private future with us.

There are many ways to solve this problem. FHE is one of them, but there are more practical solutions with better trust assumptions / feasibility today. 1. CoSnarks & MPC. @TACEO_IO gives any Aztec smart contract the ability to create private shared state by using CoSnarks. A proof is then created by an MPC network giving very similar end user properties to FHE but this works today with ZK. 2. For short term shared state e.g an order book you can use a TEE. Users create bids and asks via zk proofs, encrypted for the TEE, and the TEE can create settlement zk proofs and match them. Has the usual TEE downsides, but long term user state is protected, worst case you reveal size of trades on a given session if SGX fails

I am speaking twice today at DevCon 7 in Bangkok 🇹🇭 🙏 Privacy Preserving CBDC's (It doesn't have to be a dystopia) — 15:30 with our excellent GC @punk6052 How to decentralise your sequencer — 17:00 Come and say hi!

Sub second browser recursion is coming 🔜 ™️

I have a small micro-needle tattoo from cipherx.tech/ on my arm.  It's a smiley face :) The tattoo comes as a patch — stick it on your arm and 10 mins later, you have a painless but permanent tattoo. If I get a batch of Aztec tattoo patches made, who wants one?

Alice and Bob on a Date (at ZkSummit) Alice: Aren't you tired of sharing secrets in the same secure channels? Bob: Yeh, it's getting dull. Don't tell anyone, but sometimes I forget the secrets just to keep it fun 🤫 Alice: Stop it, you are crazy. Bob, what is your dream? Bob: I wish we could write programs and not just share secrets. Imagine writing programs that used our shared secrets... we could do ANYTHING. Alice: I am not sure, who would run the program? Bob: We would. And convince the world we ran it correctly with a succint proof. They are called ZKP's I think. Alice: I'm getting déjà vu. That sounds just like a project someone shared in the secure channel last week. It let's your write private smart contracts that do exactly that! Bob: Wait really? 🤯 Alice: Yeh I saved a copy. We.... could try it? 😊 Bob: I dunno, it was just an idea. Maybe sharing secrets is what we are meant for. Plus I only like programming in Rust. Alice: Stop being a cryptographer, we never do anything fun anymore. It's just secret sharing again and again. Plus, it's written in Noir so it's just like Rust. You will pick it up in no time. Bob: Are you sure? I really like Rust. Alice: Yes! Lets meet after ZkSummit. I will share a secret if you come 🫢 (The secure channel is X and this is a marketing post for the Aztec Sandbox)

Aztec's life started way back when - in a biscuit factory in south London. @Zac_Aztec @tomwalpo, @arnaudschenk and I, started building a syndicated loan platform on Ethereum. However, a core primitive, encryption, was missing. It's taken a few iterations but it's now here.

Thanks for covering our Testnet launch! thedefiant.io/news/blockchai…

Spoiler alert. No app developer is going to use the billion gas a second of block space you pitched this week at ETH cc. Especially if it’s running in AWS. Block space is not the issue. We need iron clad, credibly neutral privacy. We need UX that doesn’t suck. And to remember we are building decentralised systems. Everything else is at best a waste of brain power, and at worst a VC backed scam. See you at test-net.

Current CBDC designs are dystopian. All your data — embedded on an immutable public ledger. For all time. It doesn't have to be this way. The laws for CBDC's are not yet written.

1/3 GM all Ethereum builders. Today I am thrilled to announce Aztec Connect. Connect is live on testnet and allows a developer to add privacy and scaling to any DeFi protocol. Simply write a 50-100 line bridge contract. L1 Liquidty, L1 execution.

Is a rollup only stage 2 if it inherits its censorship resistance from Ethereum? Can a stage 2 rollup inherit censorship resistance from a decentralised & permissionless L2 staking set that requires a broken honesty assumption to censor? @l2beat @antoonip @VitalikButerin

I’m always humbled by the people who come to work on Aztec. Our legal team are silent hero’s. While only two people — their output is shaping our industry. From behinds the scenes policy work to amicus briefs and opinion articles. You are both rockstars @punk6052 and @TheOtherAmal 🎸🤘 Read their latest article on securing democracies with cryptography and zkps below. crypto.news/zkp-voting-promi…

Some big wins in here for interop and privacy roll ups. We see your blob increase L1 and we will consume them all.

Stuck for ideas? An NFT with private traits 🥷 Online Card Games ♠️♣️♥️♦️ On chain salary and a loan with a direct claim on the income stream 💵 Private global payments with KYC Or maybe a humble syndicated loan platform. IYKNYN🤫 DM me for more ideas!

Not dating advice. Sean can code and he can DJ. Not dating advice

I told you it’s coming soon ™️

1/2 In 2014 one of the @join_ef mentors convinced me to build a startup in the US rather than the UK. The tech scene was better, I had a co-founder and VCs would deploy capital. Fast forward 9 years and I’m proud @aztecnetwork is backed by @a16z and based in London.

Noir was originally funded by an EF grant back in 2019 - 2021 when zk wasn't as much of a thing. Its great to be giving back to the zk eco-system as Noir matures and approaches 1.0. Tune in to hear @savio_sou discuss what was funded in the grants wave.

The fact Zac built this in a weekend is both testament to how cracked Zac’s cryptography skills are and how gud Noir is. Both can be true at the same time.

The Aztec team has been hard at work reducing the size of the nullifier tree, to reduce the size of the problem. So far so good, it's been reduced by one of the largest numbers ever posted on twitter!

Pretty cool. You could replace zk TLS with a zk email from the game servers and remove a trust assumption.

A huge effort to get to this point. @smpalladino @cooper_kunz Next on the list : - full protocol spec - simulation models - proving networks All on the road to a test-net mid next year. Will you run a sequencer?

This is huge.

This has been a tireless journey from some of the best builders in the space. Kudos to @TomFrench_eth, @maximvezenov, Jake, Guillaume, @savio_sou plus many more. 🫡 And last but not least the Noirfather. Next up: optimisations, refactoring and lots of audits. 🚢🚢🚢🚢

Thanks for flagging. The current state of the rollup is as follows: We have a 2/15 MultiSig for Emergency Pause (this can only pause the system in response to a bug) We have a 1/2 MultiSig for upgrading the system. We will be adding signers to a 3/5 next week, now launch is ✅.

The rules for wallet development have fundamentally changed on Aztec. With client side execution, built in privacy and native account & fee abstraction, developers can build a wallet that is ready for mainstream. With strong privacy guarantees we can use blockchains for real world activity, payments, consumer finance and trading. With client side execution and native account abstraction, we are no long stuck with 12 world seed phrases. Hello Passkeys, FaceId, OpenAuth login, or any combination you can dream off. If you care about the world's data, build a wallet that secures it for tomorrow's users.

.@TheOtherAmal preaching truths. Zero knowledge proofs will replace traditional compliance and audit procedures over the next 5 years With ZK — systems can be designed from the ground up to only allow transactions that meet all checks and still preserve user privacy. 🤯 cointelegraph.com/news/compl…

Private fixed rate lending is coming soon ™️ Thanks @JonnyRhea and team. We can't think of a better launch partner!

Audited zk-email is coming to noir. Who is building a chrome extension that lets me prove anything in my inbox?

The next version of Aztec doesn't have these issues. It's a fully programable L2 where developers can mix and match private and public state to build any complex flow they can think of.

After every sunset, comes a sunrise. Its going to be bright. Fully programable private smart contracts, backed by Ethereum's, kind of bright. 💡☀️🌞 🔏

Theo is the 🐐. ZK passport checks will be common place in 1-2 years.

It's taken nearly 3 years of tireless work from @kevaundray and team to get Noir to this point. As of today - all of Aztec's core protocol circuits are written in Noir. We like the dog-fooding.

My favourite idea for ab2 — proof of fitness. Commit funds with friends to a shared, fitness challenge — run the London Marathon or under 20 minute 5km. Connect your fitness app. Claim the winnings when you get an email from Strava proving your time! Tune in tomorrow for how it works 🤯

There are two games being played at Devconnect. People collecting frogs 🐸 using @ZupassProject to get a hat. People sending $0.69 Dai to each other on @daimo_eth Wagmi

One future is private.

🛑🫵 If you are a developer building on a public blockchain STOP and read this. Do you care about your users? Is your goal to imprint their data on an immutable ledger? — to allow it to be indexed and displayed for all of time? 🧶

Can a rollup like Aztec be based in normal operation? As of today, I’m not sure. The witness data needed to prove the Aztec state transition requires significantly more D/A than we have in blobs pre danksharding. However using based sequencing as an emergency or backup ensures a rollup inherits the censorship and liveness properties of Ethereum.

It's 2024, Crypto punks have been surpassed by an upstart NFT collection, Goblin Plonks. Who wants to make the NFT collection? You just have to get through the write w̶h̶i̶t̶e̶p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶ colouring book first :D

Do not miss this. Real world use cases.

Getting ready to 🚢

Today we launched Aztec Connect (again...) This is 1+ years of incredible work from the Aztec team. From engineering to crypto, frontend, business, growth and ops. Each one of you has crushed it. Thank you 💜 nitter.app/aztecnetwork/status/15… 🧵 Read on for launch related NFT alpha...

Making blockchains great again