AZTEC Protocol

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on: 2019
• Mainnet release: 15-3-2021

• AZTEC Protocol is an open source zero-knowledge protocol built on top of Ethereum, making plug-and-play value transmission and asset governance privacy tools for developers and companies. 
• Their CTO has contributed to two open source projects with the aim of making cryptography cheaper on Ethereum:
  1. Optimisations to the evmone interpreter
  2. Adding batch pairing computation to the Parity BN library
• Created an universal zk-snark construction, called PLONK, which was released (9-2019) in collaboration with Protocol Labs.

Launch

• Have announced (9-2019) their upcoming multi-party computation set-up ceremony and opened to applications for 200 participants to take part in a global relay. The ceremony will build a ‘Reference String’, an echo of ZCash’s Powers of Tau Ceremony, and will lead up to mainnet launch at the end of October. More details on how the ceremony works here. 
• Vitalik announced his participation in the Ignition ceremony, using his own implementation of the MPC.

• AZTEC has completed Ignition, the biggest MPC ceremony in history by number of participants. From their blog (7-1-2020):

"600 sign-ups, 202 participants ran the software — of which 176 were valid, 30 participants stayed incognito. Most participants came from London

Confidential transactions on Ethereum are launching this month!

2 audits completed (Trail of Bits & ConsenSys Diligence), Ceremony finished, Codex computation finished this week → Deploy to Mainnet January 2020"

• From Proof of Work #78 (29-10-2019):

"we’re doing final deploy tests for our mainnet protocol, preparing for our launch later this year."

• Has launched on Eth Mainnet on 1-2-2020.

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Bugs/Exploits

• From Week in Ethereum (30-10-2021):

"Aztec $50k bug bounty for double-spend vulnerability, emulating non-native field operations."

zkTokens

• Does not have a token itself, but releases zk Tokens. The first of which at the launch (1-2-2020) was zkDai. "Over the coming six weeks we’ll release other zk Tokens onto the network, and in two months’ time we will remove restrictions so you can make completely private custom assets from scratch."
• From this article by TrustNodes (10-2-2020):

"You need to deposit dai through the ZkDai (zkassetdetailed) contract, through a zero knowledge proof.” Aztec turns dai into what can be described as a smart contract database asset. You send the dai to Aztec, and you get zkdai which gives you a claim to the dai.

You can transfer this zkdai within the smart contract environment, but the blockchain won’t know until you convert it into dai. In the meantime you’re exchanging value in a very private manner. End users can’t quite play yet with Aztec because an app is not out, but devs can incorporate it through a tutorial of sorts."

Tech

• From their blog (10-6-2021):

"Aztec initially realeased some of its prover code under the Polaris license jointly created with StarkWare. Today we announce that all future releases of code from Aztec will be under the [open source] Apache 2.0 license."

• From their own launch blog (1-2-2020):

"Aztec has deployed the two core components of its technology today:

1. Aztec Crypto Engine (ACE) — our smart contract validator on Ethereum mainnet, checking the correctness of every private transaction
2. Privacy SDK — abstracts away the complexities of Aztec’s cryptography, so developers can integrate privacy into their dapps with ease"

Upgrades

• From Decrypt (16-12-2021):

"Aztec announced it is unrolling a set of tools, dubbed Aztec Connect, to let developers add its privacy feature to a wide variety of protocols by using a software bridge. "It allows users to confidentially access world-class DeFi services on Ethereum with up to 100x cost savings, all while strengthening Aztec’s existing privacy guarantees. At launch, Aztec Connect extends the capabilities of zk.money, adding whitelisted functionality from select blue-chip DeFi partners," said the company in a blog post."

• Aztec 2.0 went live (12-10-2020):

1. "zkRollup based Layer 2 network, live on Ropsten
2. Private sends by default — shield and send your ERC-20s privately
3. 200x gas reduction compared to Aztec 1.0
4. Secure by design: all transactions are validated on-chain
5. Programmable Privacy with Noir — The private contract language"

Validation

• From this article by TrustNodes (10-2-2020):

"bitcoiners would argue that because you can’t validate yourself, you can’t be sure zkdai or zcash has not been printed out of thin air.

“That’s not actually true — the point of a parity check is to prove that each transaction has a net zero effect on supply,” says Tom Walton-Pocock, after further adding: “I think I’d return with the question ‘under what conditions can the parity check over Aztec’s encrypted balances fail?’."

Zk-Zk Rollup

• Is putting Zk's inside Zk's (24-4-2020):

"With this code, we can efficiently verify a SNARK inside another SNARK.

In ZK² Rollup, the spender makes a private transaction on their own device, keeping their data secret — this is a ‘proof computation’.

Instead of sending straight to Ethereum (too expensive), they send to a ‘rollup provider’, which aggregates 1,000s of transactions into a ‘rollup proof’. This collapses the gas cost on Ethereum, and makes our payments network scale.

Here are the benchmarks we’d like (in a perfect world):

1. ~1s proof construction times on smartphones
2. ~10s proof construction times for rollups (server-side)
3. ~1,000tps on mainnet
4. 3 layer recursion — proofs of proofs of proofs"

Privacy Method

• From Bankless (15-4-2021):

"Beyond private Ethereum transactions on the platform, which help users protect their privacy and save on gas costs, Aztec can be used as your anonymous DeFi wallet. In other words, it can be used to wash and anonymize your funds if you’re ever trying to fund a new address.

When sending zkETH from zk.money to a regular Ethereum address, the recipient will receive regular, "unshielded" ETH directly to the wallet. The trick here is that Etherscan will show the funds were sent from the 'Aztec Contract' and not the sender's address.

By using Aztec, you could fund new DeFi wallets without worrying someone may track your trail of breadcrumbs. Better yet, you could use zk.money to protect your funds!"

Roadmap

• From their blog (27-3-2020):

"Our privacy roadmap is as follows:

1. ✅ Balance privacy — hiding transaction amounts
2. ⌛ User privacy (coming soon) — hiding ‘spender’ and ‘receiver’ info
3. ✘ Code privacy — hiding asset/code being spent/run"

Usage

• JPMorgan's blockchain team trialed Aztec during a series of ZKP tests in February 2018.

Competition

• Other Layer 2 solutions like Optimism, Starkware, Arbitrum and Hermez.

Team, Funding, Partners, etc.

• London based
• Thomas Walton-Pocock; CEO
• Joe Andrews; co-founder
• Zac Williamson; CTO
• Arnaud Schenk
• Ariel Gabizon; chief scientist

Funding

• ConsenSys led a $2.1 million funding round for Aztec in November 2019.
• On their website (11-2-2020):

Consensys, a_capital, Coinbase, Mov37, Samos Investments and ef.

• From this article by TrustNodes (10-2-2020):

"So how are they going to make money?

“On value capture we’re not passing detailed comment on that now (not least because the blockchain and zero-knowledge landscape is changing at a breathless pace at the moment). We will lay out our model publicly at a later date,” Walton-Pocock says."

• From Decrypt (16-12-2021):

"Raised $17 million. Crypto investment giant Paradigm led the latest funding round for Aztec, while other investors included Ethereal Ventures and Vitalk Buterin himself."

Partners

• Worked together with StarkWare. From their blog (29-1-2021):

"Polaris license under which StarkWare plans to release source code for its STARK prover; Aztec will use the same Polaris license for its PLONK provers (see their post)."

• Has contributed to Pickles (for snarks) on Mina (19-8-202).
• Arranged a partnership with DeFi lending service Element (16-12-2021).