How Aztec Network Could Make Ethereum Privacy's Biggest Winner

Joe Andrews (0:00)

I think the more interesting kind of privacy technologies are ones that can actually power the world's transactions, and that's kind of where we sit.

John Gillen (0:07)

Every time you pay someone on Ethereum, you're basically handing them your bank statement, your balance sheet, your history, everyone you've ever paid. But today, one of the original privacy teams in crypto is here to change that. ZK.money is making its comeback. What is this? What does it mean? And what do you need to know about it? Hello and welcome to Milk Road Crypto, the show that would tell you what's in our wallet, but that's none of your business. I'm your host John Gillen. Today is Monday, September 28th, and we are going to be releasing this episode on Tuesday, September 29th, because of a press embargo.

But today we are joined by Joe Andrews, who is the co-founder and CEO of Aztec Labs, the company behind the Aztec Network, which is a privacy focused Ethereum layer too. Privacy is one of the hottest stories in crypto right now. Joe is one of the leading experts on all of this. He's going to tell us what you need to know about it. If that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe, share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. As a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful partners at Nexo, the digital asset platform that lets you trade, earn and borrow, all in one place, all in one account. Keeping you out for more information on them later in the episode. But for now, welcome to Milk Road Crypto. Joe, Andrews, how are you?

Joe Andrews (1:15)

Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me on. I'm super excited to be here.

John Gillen (1:19)

I'm excited to talk to you, man. You're doing some big things. Joe, before we get into ZK.money, tell us a little bit about yourself. What is Aztec Labs? What is the Aztec network? And what should people know about these things?

Joe Andrews (1:30)

Yeah, I think we can start maybe seven, eight years ago now. So my journey in crypto has been a long one. We kind of started in 2017, 2018 kind of like green-eyed and looking at this kind of new technology to disrupt kind of modern like on-chain kind of like, well, bring modern banking practices on-chain and other things. And we started looking in 2017, 2018 about how we could put like corporate finance onto blockchains. And we realized pretty quickly that blockchains as they stood back then, were pretty useless for most real world interactions because they lack a core tenant which is privacy. If you kind of, you know, transact in the real world today, you just have this level of privacy that we take for granted in the Western world.

You know, if I can't see your bank account when you pay me, I can't see, you know, how much you spend on your groceries.

There's just these basic principles that didn't exist on blockchains for the last kind of 10 plus years. When we were starting to think about putting in corporate finance on-chain, the problem kind of compounds. Like businesses have this to an even higher degree than kind of, you know, we expect. Like most businesses rely on some information asymmetry, whether it's, you know, their suppliers, how much they buy a product for their portfolios, what they're trading. Like the whole kind of corporate finance industry relies on information asymmetry. And usually you get that for a middleman. And for this to kind of work on a public blockchain, something had to change. And so when we started trying to put this, these corporate finance tools on Ethereum, we kept running into the same problem of it's all public. This is not going to work. And so Zach, my co-founder at the time, started trying to solve that problem. And the technology behind privacy on Ethereum and public blockchains in general has expanded a lot in the last decade. Like eight, nine years ago, you could barely kind of encrypt a number and put it on chain. And what Aztec is, is kind of the culmination of eight plus years of research, mostly by kind of Zach, who is kind of the co-founder of Aztec as well, into zero-knowledge proofs that enable you to now not just encrypt numbers, but encrypt entire programs. And so we've been building this kind of technology suite, which culminated in the launch of a fully decentralized layer 2 on Ethereum late last year.

And the network kind of went live in alpha form earlier this year. And that is the Aztec network. It's a layer 2 that allows you to deploy private applications on top of public Ethereum. So you can have private state, public state, you can encrypt things. Kind of all of the things we wanted kind of seven, eight years ago are now possible.