Repost the original title ‘Gold Rush Handbook | How to lay out Ethereum privacy L2 disruptor Aztec?’

In the development process of blockchain technology, the contradiction between privacy protection and transparency has always been a focus of the industry. Ethereum has built a cornerstone of trust with its strong decentralization and verifiability, but the mechanism of completely public transaction data exposes users’ privacy to all-round monitoring.

In this context, the emergence of the Aztec privacy network brings new possibilities to solve this contradiction. On May 1, 2025, Aztec officially launched its public test network and opened permissions to developers for the first time, meaning that developers can build applications with full privacy protection capabilities based on the Ethereum ecosystem.

As a privacy Layer2 solution in the Ethereum ecosystem, Aztec uses zero-knowledge proof technology to provide users and DApps with programmable privacy protection and low-cost transaction processing. This article will introduce the project overview, core team and financing history, project development context, and interactive operation guide in several dimensions.

How about the Aztec background?

Aztec developed by Aztec Labs, founded in 2017. Aztec Labs adopts a fully remote working mode, and currently lists 67 team members on its official website. Some of the core leadership are as follows:

• Co-founder and CEO Zac Williamson: Co-inventor of zero-knowledge proof system PLONK, holds a PhD in particle physics from the University of Oxford.
• Co-founder and President Joe Andrews: EF9 Cohort member, holds a Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science from Imperial College London, and previously served as the CTO of Radish, a food technology company in Silicon Valley.
• Co-founder Tom Walton Pocock: former Aztec CEO, currently not listed on the Aztec official website team roster.
• CTO Charlie Lye: Bachelor of Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University with 20 years of experience. Former Chief Engineer at Triptease, C++ Engineer at Bloomberg, and C++ Engineer at BetFair.
• COO Lisa Cuesta Bunin: Master of Business Administration from Harvard University, Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Former head of NextGen Venture Partners, which has been acquired by Brown Advisory.
• CMO Claire Kart: Formerly worked at RISC Zero, Mina Foundation (Founder), O(1) Labs, Ripple, SoFi, and other companies.
• CFO Scott Siversen: Former CFO of ShapeShift.

In terms of financing, Aztec has attracted the favor of many capital sources, with a total funding amount exceeding 1.19 billion US dollars.

In November 2018, Aztec completed a $2.1 million seed round of financing with Consensys Labs leading the investment.

In December 2021, Aztec completed a $17 million Series A financing round, led by Paradigm, with participation from a_capital, Ethereal Ventures, Libertus Capital, Variant Fund, Nascent, IMToken, Scalar Capital, Defi Alliance, IOSG Ventures, and ZK Validator. Angel investors include Anthony Sassano, Stani Kulechov, Bankless, Defi Dad, Mariano Conti, and Vitalik Buterin.

In December 2022, Aztec completed a $100 million Series B financing, led by a16z crypto, with participation from A Capital, King River, Variant, SV Angel, Hash Key, Fenbushi, and AVG.

What is Aztec?

Aztec is a privacy-centric Ethereum L2 scaling network dedicated to achieving user privacy on Ethereum while supporting programmable smart contracts.

How does Aztec increase privacy? Aztec encodes additional checks in the zk-SNARK circuit of zk-Rollup, introducing the concepts of private state and private functions to fundamentally ensure the privacy and security of each transaction.

Specifically, Aztec adopts a model where private functions and public functions work together. Private functions are executed on the user’s local device to protect privacy and generate proofs; public functions are executed by the sequencer in Aztec’s own virtual machine (AVM) to operate public state, which is visible to everyone. A transaction can simultaneously contain calls to private and public functions, and strictly follows the order of executing private functions locally first, and then executing public functions in AVM.

It is worth mentioning that, due to Aztec’s privacy mechanism strongly relying on client-side proof generation and encryption data, and incompatible with the EVM architecture, it is not EVM-compatible. Additionally, Aztec has created a new virtual machine - AVM (Aztec Virtual Machine). AVM contracts are written in Noir (designed specifically for zero-knowledge applications and privacy contracts), compiled into ZK circuits, where each function is a ZK SNARK verification key.

In terms of the state model, Aztec adopts a mixed model of private and public states. The public state is stored and updated by the sequencer, which performs state transitions, generates proofs of correct execution (or delegates proof generation to the prover network), and publishes relevant data to Ethereum.

And private states are stored in the form of UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output, referred to as Notes by Aztec), which can only be decrypted by the holder. The hash value of Notes is stored in a Merkle tree (note hash tree). When you ‘spend’ a note, Aztec will mark the original note’s commitment as ‘nullified’ and create a new note, assigning it to a new owner, achieving a similar effect to cash change. External observers cannot track the flow of funds.

Using Aztec as an example, Notes are similar to cash but slightly different. In real life, when you want to spend $3.50, you would hand over a $5 bill to the cashier, who keeps $3.50 and gives you back $1.50. When using private notes on Aztec, if you want to spend a $5 note, you would invalidate it and create a $1.5 note (owned by you) and a $3.5 bill (owned by the recipient). Only you and the recipient know about this $3.5 transaction, they are unaware that you have ‘split’ the $5 bill.

Aztec development context and milestones

Aztec Labs’ initial goal was to build an on-chain credit platform CreditMint. However, the team later found in practice that public blockchains lacking privacy protection could not widely gain user trust, prompting Aztec to decisively shift towards privacy technology development.

In 2019, the Aztec team released the zero-knowledge proof system PLONK, significantly reducing the cost of proof generation and verification.

In 2021 and 2022, Aztec successively launched zk.money and Aztec Connect (Ethereum privacy DeFi solution Aztec Connect).

By the end of 2022, Aztec released the open-source zero-knowledge programming language Noir (based on Rust), simplifying privacy smart contract development and reducing the entry barrier for developers.

In 2023, Aztec strategically adjusted to stop using zk.money and Aztec Connect, and fully transitioned to a completely decentralized ZK Rollup, focusing on the development of Noir language and next-generation encrypted blockchain.

In February 2025, Aztec launched the Aztec Foundation, which will conduct basic research in the field of enhancing cryptographic freedom. It will also provide support for developers to help them develop innovative applications, protect user privacy, ensure compliance, and maintain the universal language Noir of zero-knowledge proofs.

On May 1, 2025, Aztec launched the Aztec public testnet, aimed at rigorously testing decentralization in terms of ordering, proving, and governance before the mainnet release.

Aztec Public Testnet

Aztec is committed to becoming a fully decentralized, permissionless, and privacy-focused Layer2 network on Ethereum. The Aztec public testnet is a platform for developers, node operators, and regular users to explore privacy blockchains together, focusing on testing three decentralized requirements: decentralized ordering, decentralized proofs, and decentralized governance mechanisms.

In terms of decentralized ordering, anyone can run an ordering node to participate in transaction ordering, block proposal, and validation of blocks generated by other ordering nodes. The ordering network adopts a PoS mechanism similar to Ethereum, but block validation is completed by randomly selected 48 sequencers. Two-thirds validation is required to confirm the block, achieving fast pre-confirmation, while leveraging Ethereum to ensure the security of final settlement.

In terms of decentralized proof, the prover generates cryptographic proofs to verify the correctness of public transactions, ultimately forming a Rollup proof submitted to Ethereum. The proof client developed by Aztec Labs includes three components: the proof node identifies the period of unproven work (a collection of 32 blocks) and creates individual proof jobs; the proving broker adds these proof job requests to the queue and assigns them to idle proof agents; the proof agent computes the actual proofs. After the final proof computation is completed, the proof node sends the proof to L1 for verification. The Aztec network will distribute proof rewards to all users who submit proofs on time, thereby reducing the centralization risk of the network dominated by entities with a large amount of computing power.

How can I participate?

1. For developers: log in to the developer login page ( https://aztec.network/developers), use public and private components to customize and deploy contracts.

2, for node operators:

The sorter node can be participated by using ordinary consumer-grade hardware.（戳ThisUnderstand Operation Guide)

The validator nodes require higher computational power to participate in generating zero-knowledge proofs. BumpThisUnderstanding the operating guide (According to Aztec official, running a prover node requires higher hardware requirements than running a sequencer node, with approximately 40 machines expected, each machine equipped with 16 cores and 128GB of memory.)

It is important to note that due to the potentially high cost of running a prover and the fact that costs on the testnet and mainnet are the same, Aztec’s public testnet limits transaction speed to 0.2 transactions per second (TPS).

Of course, Aztec also emphasizes, ‘No airdrops, no marketing gimmicks. Just want to create a community of high-skill operators.’ However, Aztec stated that running nodes can get Discord identity groups.

3. For ordinary users:

InteractionAztec ecosystem:

• CreateObsidionOrAzguardWallet;
• InHuman TechCross-chain: bring Ethereum testnet tokens cross-chain;
• InNEMIExchange (currently requires access code);
• Raven HouseNFT market interaction.

Disclaimer:

1. This article is reprinted from [Foresight NewsThe original title is “Gold Rush Manual | How to Layout the Ethereum Privacy L2 Disruptor Aztec?”, copyright belongs to the original author [KarenZ, Foresight News], if you have any objections to the reprint, please contactGate Learn teamThe team will process it as soon as possible according to the relevant procedures.
2. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. The other language versions of the article are translated by the Gate Learn team, without mentioning [GateUnder no circumstances may the translated articles be copied, distributed or plagiarized.