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 Apache 2.0 license.
The hope is that this will increase scrutiny and collaboration on our code, in the great tradition of open source.
Why Apache 2.0?
Aztec is building a fundamentally new kind of network — one that will support fully programmable private smart contracts. The keystone technologies that enable this are our state of the art cryptography software and Noir, our private smart programming language.
We succeed when our users can perform all of their on-chain interactions without leaking any information about themselves or their transactions. We can’t do this without an active community of users and developers building innovative products and protocols on our network.
To this end we’re adopting a fully open source approach. We want our community to not only use and integrate our tools and technology into their software stack, but also modify it in the best way that fits their needs.
All levels of our software stack are going to be published under the Apache 2.0 license. Any software connected to code published to the Ethereum main-net will be public and open-source.
The Aztec tech stack:
- Barretenberg: our cryptography backend that implements our state-of-the-art zkSNARK technology
- Noir: The Noir zkSNARK programming language
- SDK: javascript SDK to construct Aztec L2 private transactions and manage private wallets
- Falafel: Our backend rollup server architecture
- zk.money: Our privacy web-wallet front-end
We’ll be publishing all of the above to our open-source github repo over the next two weeks.
We’re looking forward to deploying more ways of performing private interactions, including a way of performing cheap and fully private low-cost transactions with L1 DeFi protocols. Stay tuned for more!
Ariel and Zac.
Aztec is going open source! was originally published in The Aztec Labs Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
