Aztec's Rebirth, The $61M Token Sale & Programmable Privacy on Ethereum

**Friederike Ernst** (0:00)
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Friederike Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Zac Williamson. You're not going to launch this thing without decentralization, right? Kind of like you want a decentralized sequencer and proofers.

**Zac Williamson** (0:18)
We're not doing this out of some moral crusade. We're doing it with decentralization because we need to be, we can't be centralized. We'd have to build in the back door. We don't want to build in the back door. Back doors are really bad.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:26)
You want to use things that are battle tested as much as you can, right? Building novel things kind of means having to build new systems. But trying to possibly fall back on proven systems.

**Zac Williamson** (0:41)
There's no such thing. We are the first. Aztec will be the full back for future generations of private cryptography. Once we get beta, we will be much more comfortable making claims about its security. We'll be much more comfortable with people putting large amounts of funds in. But until then, it's going to be a risky protocol.

**Friederike Ernst** (1:03)
I'm Friederike Ernst, and today, I'm speaking with Zac Williamson, co-founder and CEO of Aztec, a layer two network, building what it calls programmable privacy for Ethereum. So Aztec was once known for private transfers, but a couple of years ago, the team did something that very few projects actually dared to go through with. They shut everything down and rebuilt from scratch. The new Aztec promises fully private smart contracts, not just private balances, but private logic computation identity, while still remaining compatible with Ethereum's public ecosystem. We'll dive into all the details in just a bit.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:49)
This episode has brought you my Gnosis, building the open Internet one block at a time. Gnosis was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. Gnosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others, like Safe and Cowswap. At the center is Gnosis Chain. It's a low fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like Gnosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Gnosis DAO, a community run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring gnosis.io.

**Friederike Ernst** (2:41)
Zac, thank you so much for coming on again.

**Zac Williamson** (2:45)
Thank you so much for having me on. It's a pleasure to be back here after all these years.

**Friederike Ernst** (2:49)
Absolutely. Yeah, you were last on Epicenter when Aztec was still running its earlier version. Tell us what's happened since.

**Zac Williamson** (3:00)
Yeah. So back then, I think we were on Aztec Connect, which was a continuation of the world's first fully private rollout. So it was a layer 2 network where you could send private transactions and use our network effectively as an anonymous proxy into Ethereum DeFi. So you could talk to something like a Uniswap or an Aave contract and have the Aztec smart contract act as your proxy. Then the result of that DeFi interaction would come back into the Aztec network, and then you could take your claim of it privately. So back then, that was the most advanced thing we could do with the technology that we had available at the time. Something we call Turbo Plonk was an extension of the original Plonk paper that we put out in 2019 But the Aztec network was never really the full aspirations of the network. We built it because we wanted to demonstrate that privacy was possible and useful and needed. What we wanted to do all along was create a private smart contract ecosystem. So one where instead of just doing transfers or talking to DeFi, you can have a sharing complete smart contract language where you can write your own state, your own state transition functions, and describe the logic of whatever protocol you desired. But with private data as a first-class primitive. So that's what we decided to build, I think, shortly after our first conversation.

**Friederike Ernst** (4:26)
Why did you decide to rebuild this completely instead of just iterating on the old system? Because, I mean, obviously people were already on there, people were using it.

**Zac Williamson** (4:36)
That would have been nice, I think it was 60,000 multi-active users, it was growing quite rapidly.