Blockchain
Aztec Labs creates a hybrid zero-knowledge suite designed to execute smart contracts in a private, reliable, and scalable way.
Developers built the Ethereum blockchain to optimize public consensus at the expense of native privacy, and privacy solutions often fail to support a complex ecosystem of decentralized applications.
Aztec’s hybrid zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup solution aims to solve this problem. In an interview with Blockworks, Joe Andrews, head of product at Aztec Protocol, said that “we are trying to build the layer of privacy that we wish existed when we started putting corporate debt on Ethereum all those years ago… the exciting thing is that we think we can actually do it now.
Aztec plans to combine private and public execution in one ZK package. This is one of the fundamental differences between it and other Ethereum ZK rollups, Andrews notes.
“I think about Ethereum or other rollups in a way that’s like — here’s my transaction request, please do this off-chain and make a proof that you did it correctly, on Aztec, it’s here’s proof that I have a transaction have done, please include it in your next record of transactions,” Andrews said.
This means an encrypted transaction takes place exclusively on a user’s device, unlike other ZK rollups today, he said.
In practice, the use cases of this type of hybrid zkRollup could be used to enable confidentiality in various dapps — not just privacy apps, Zachary Williamson, the chief technology officer at Aztec Protocol, told Blockworks.
“What it does is it expands the design space of what you can build … you can build applications where the goal isn’t just privacy, it requires hiding information to do what you need to do,” Williamson said.
Gaming could be one of these things, in addition to private voting in DAOs or making private trades on public automated market makers (AMMs), he claimed.
To enable the computation of private smart contracts, the team is also developing its own privacy-focused programming language for smart contracts, known as “Noir”.
Noir is completely open source and will be a general zero-knowledge circuit language designed to prove any cryptographic backend.
“The reason we want to be programmable and why we have a language is because the ideas we can come up with as a first-party builder pale in comparison to what’s going to be unlocked by these tools just to the whole community,” said Williamson .
As it stands, users can deploy private contracts on Aztec’s local system, while the public side of the technology is still in the works.
The team said it is currently targeting a Q3 testnet for local developers and full remote testnets early next year.