Aztec Network
22 Nov
## min read

Infinite Privacy: New Anonymity Paradigms with Aztec Network

Discover how Aztec Network's latest privacy paradigms redefine anonymity, offering unprecedented privacy levels in the blockchain world.

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Written by
Jon Wu
Edited by

Endlessly expanding privacy sets with Aztec Network.

In the last article in our series on Aztec’s privacy architecture, we explored how a private network is even possible on a public blockchain.

Today we’re exploring why a private network can be private and compliant.

Aztec offers basic deposits and withdrawals — meant to provide consumer privacy to Ethereum users: our current private payments front-end zk.money has been live on mainnet since March and recently crossed 4,800 ETH in deposits bridged.

But zk.money also offers private internal transfers and will soon offer a full suite of Ethereum Layer 1 Defi functionality enabled by our bridge, Aztec Connect.

The addition of DeFi functionality means Aztec will offer a large and dynamic privacy set that will become increasingly more complex and privacy-protecting—a concept we like to call Infinite Privacy.

The Infinite City

Imagine Aztec as a walled city. All an outside observer can see is users entering and leaving Aztec via our bridge.

Within the walls of the city, users can exchange assets with fully private transactions. Neither the network nor its participants can see the senders and recipients of transactions, nor their amounts.

Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. With credit to http://joelgehringer.com/blog/the-city-of-dreams/.

In addition, once inside the system, users can batch transactions and teleport back to L1 — to swap, stake for yield, lend funds, vote in DAOs, or buy NFTs. In the near future the contributors to ConstitutionDAO will be able to do so privately, and with nearly 0 gas.

Because Aztec allows for these two new anonymizing activities — internal transactions and batched interactions with Layer 1 Ethereum— the privacy set is difficult for an observer to calculate.

That’s a very good thing.

Sleuthing and Deducing

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of an adversary attempting to run de-anonymizing transaction graph analysis.

As an observer watching Ethereum activity, we might watch deposits to and from Aztec, and attempt to deduce what set of deposits a certain withdrawal might belong to.

This is what we mean by privacy or anonymity set — the group or set of users a forensic target could be. If the privacy set the target belongs to is large, then we can only guess with a small probability which addresses and transactions the target is associated with.

Once the privacy set you belong to approaches 1, the probability an observer knows who you are also approaches 1, and your privacy is no longer protected.

Let’s talk through an example.

Anonymity Sets 101

Pretend we were internet sleuths trying to de-anonymize other privacy protocols .️

If we saw someone withdraw 1 ETH, we’d know for certain that they’d deposited at least 1 ETH. Because there are no internal transfers, aggregation of multiple deposits into a larger withdrawal simply isn’t possible.

“So,” we’d puzzle, “all we need to figure out is how many people have ever deposited at least 1 ETH, and then the withdrawer must be one of those people!”

Good thing we have Dune Analytics to help us visualize how some of these privacy sets might work! You can see our privacy set dashboard here: https://dune.xyz/jaosef/Aztec-2.

The answer to the question of who the 1 ETH withdrawal could be in this case would be “everyone to the right of 1 ETH in this diagram,” which turns out to be 1,174 deposits.

The privacy set in a world without internal transfers.

Of course, the probability that a 1-ETH withdrawer came from the 1 ETH deposit set is much higher than the probability that she came from the >1 ETH deposit set, for a purely behavioral reason:

It’s annoying to break 5-, 10-, or 30-ETH deposits into smaller 1 ETH withdrawals. It’s much simpler to do one big monolithic withdrawal.

So as sophisticated sleuths, our investigative instincts would say that there is some non-zero but small probability that the withdrawer deposited an amount >1 ETH, with that probability diminishing for larger deposits:

This is an example of a simple probability distribution — and the “spikier” it is, the more certainty an adversary has about user behaviors.

In this case, based on observations of other protocols and comparable behaviors on Defi, a forensic analyst might think the probability of a 1 ETH withdrawal coming from a 5 ETH deposit is 5x lower than the probability of a 1 ETH withdrawal coming from a 1 ETH deposit.

Standing In or Standing Out

Let’s establish a rough heuristic guide to thinking about privacy sets:

In order to figure out how to blend in, figure out how to stand out, and then do the opposite.

The most obvious way for me to stand out in the case without internal transactions would be if I bridged a massive monolithic deposit and withdrew the same amount shortly afterward.

To make myself even more highly identifiable, I would use a unique quantity of a certain asset (e.g. depositing 69.696969 ETH to Aztec, then subsequently withdrawing 69.696969 ETH). To prevent de-anonymizing behavior, the zk.money front-end suggests round-number deposits and withdrawals — so you don’t stand out — and will soon also nudge users toward the largest anonymity sets.

As users what we want to do is introduce uncertainty into any forensic analysis. Keen observers should feel frustrated by our actions. They should say something like, “Dang, calculating the probability that these two addresses are affiliated is so complex and low-probability that it’s not meaningful for me to try to figure out which deposit is related to which withdrawal.”

I sum our conclusions in this extremely sophisticated 2x2 matrix of behaviors:

Very. Sophisticated.

So given what we know, how as a collective can we introduce more uncertainty into the adversary’s analysis?

  1. Increase the size of each deposit set, especially large deposits
  2. “Spread out” the probability that the withdrawal could have come from any deposit set!

Other protocols focus on #1. Let’s talk about what #2 adds.

Internal Transfers: The Inner Sanctum

There is a big caveat here that differentiates our current zk.money front-end — there is a possibility that your anonymity set includes deposits that are smaller than your withdrawal amount.

How? Because of internal transfers.

Say you withdraw 10 ETH. You could have deposited 10 ETH.

Or you could have deposited 5 ETH, used or coordinated offchain with 5 unassociated addresses to deposit and send you 1 ETH each internally, and then in the end withdrew 10 ETH. Suddenly you could be, well, pretty much anyone, so long as two things hold:

  • The amount of assets in the system is sufficient to support the hypothetical withdrawal scenario
  • The number of transactions in the intervening time exceeds the number needed to compose the hypothetical withdrawal scenario

So in this case, you could be some combination of internal transactions summing to 10E:

  • 10 internal 1E transfers
  • 100 internal 0.1E transfers
  • 1,000 internal 0.01E transfers
  • Some combination of the above

Of course, as the number of internal transfers needed to sum to a withdrawal amount increases, the less likely it actually happened — realistically, who’s going to coordinate 1,000 unaffiliated addresses to privately send them funds!

That’s why the internal economy of Aztec matters, and why Aztec Connect — a bridge allowing anyone to interact with defi contracts on Layer 1 — will help explode the anonymity set, making it highly improbable to associate any deposits with withdrawals.

Internal transfers muddy up anonymity set calculations, but only if there are a sufficient number of internal transfers and a large enough quantity of deposits in the system.

Aztec Connect: The Bridge to Infinity

Now let’s introduce the idea of Aztec Connect, an expansion of zk.money’s functionality to include batch interactions with any Layer 1 smart contract.

That means to begin with, any Layer 1 Defi functionality will be available to Aztec users.

Deposit $ETH on zk.money? On a competing protocol, you’d have to wait for the funds to be “seasoned” before withdrawal— essentially waiting for the privacy set to grow before withdrawing funds. That’s why for instance there are billions sitting in privacy protocols.

Using Aztec Connect, you can bridge funds back to Layer 1 and make shielded assets productive while you wait — meaning you might not want to ever withdraw!

With a simple conventional privacy protocol, you deposit funds and simply wait — for what, you ask? For the anonymity set to grow! Meanwhile, deposited funds are completely unproductive. Capital efficiency, schmapital efficiency.

Here are some arbitrary possible examples of using private assets while they are inside the system:

  • Staking ETH in Lido for stETH, depositing it in the stETH-ETH pool and getting double yield
  • Entering into an Element.fi fixed rate yield vault
  • Swapping ETH for OHM on OlympusDAO, staking for sOHM, and (3, 3)ing privately

This is just a teaser! We’ll cover Aztec Connect in depth later in this series, but for now I want to focus on the idea that investing capital for yield on Aztec will grow the value locked in the system.

Bridging back to Ethereum functionally has the same privacy-set-expanding benefits as having new users deposit fresh funds or having you deposit more funds, while being privacy-protected.

This spreads out the probability distribution:

And makes it less and less likely that you belong to any one given depositor set. Imagine depositing 0.1 ETH and (3, 3)ing on OlympusDAO until your OHM is worth 1 ETH! Now you’ve really thrown off the scent.

Purify Before Entering

Now, what Aztec doesn’t do is protect users on mainnet, and poor security hygiene on Ethereum can hurt user privacy.

But there’s some good news here — simply follow privacy best-practices.

Let’s start with one of the biggest no-no’s for any privacy preservation system: withdrawing to the same address.

Don’t do this.

Why is withdrawing to the same address “bad?” In addition to reducing your own anonymity, you’re basically screwing everyone else over. You’re reducing the anonymity set by removing yourself from it, saying, “I’m taking my ball back.”

Now there’s no way your deposit could actually be the source of anyone else’s withdrawal but your own!

Withdrawing to the same address you deposited is akin to saying, “These are the funds I brought! It’s special because my mommy gave it to me.” Okay Jimmy, that’s fine, but imagine if everyone did that. If everyone identified themselves and their funds, it would:

  1. defeat the purpose of using private transfers in the first place
  2. harm everyone else’s privacy
Jimmy always takes his ball back. Dang it, Jimmy.

Now consider the inverse: a large number of addresses deposit, and a large number (but not the same!) addresses withdraw. Now we’d have a very hard time associating one wallet with another.

Critically, any transaction graph analysis on Layer 1 may be able to associate those accounts and therefore collapse many addresses. Depositing to Aztec and withdrawing to an address already associated with the depository address is akin to withdrawing to the same address. That’s why withdrawals should only happen to untouched or otherwise unaffiliated wallets.

Hygiene takeaways:

  • Use common deposit and withdrawal amounts
  • Avoid making large deposits or large withdrawals (though large withdrawals are worse)
  • Don’t withdraw to the same address you deposited to

To Infinity and Beyond

We hope this helps you understand how and why Aztec Network builds upon the fundamental preservation mechanisms used by privacy protocols.

This stuff is meant to hurt your brain! The harder it is to deduce your set, the harder it is for a de-anonymizing foe. And if you are a researcher interested in de-anonymization, forensics, and transaction graph analysis, please reach out to us at hello@aztecprotocol.com.

Join the Aztec community

We’re also always on the lookout for talented engineers and applied cryptographers. If joining our mission to bring scalable privacy to Ethereum excites you — get in touch with us! hello@aztecprotocol.com.

And continue the conversation with us on Discord or Twitter.

Infinite Privacy: New Anonymity Paradigms with Aztec Network was originally published in Aztec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Aztec Network
Aztec Network
24 Sep
xx min read

Testnet Retro - 2.0.3 Network Upgrade

Special thanks to Santiago Palladino, Phil Windle, Alex Gherghisan, and Mitch Tracy for technical updates and review.

On September 17th, 2025, a new network upgrade was deployed, making Aztec more secure and flexible for home stakers. This upgrade, shipped with all the features needed for a fully decentralized network launch, includes a completely redesigned slashing system that allows inactive or malicious operators to be removed, and does not penalize home stakers for short outages. 

With over 23,000 operators running validators across 6 continents (in a variety of conditions), it is critical not to penalize nodes that temporarily drop due to internet connectivity issues. This is because users of the network are also found across the globe, some of whom might have older phones. A significant effort was put into shipping a low-memory proving mode that allows older mobile devices to send transactions and use privacy-preserving apps. 

The network was successfully deployed, and all active validators on the old testnet were added to the queue of the new testnet. This manual migration was only necessary because major upgrades to the governance contracts had gone in since the last testnet was deployed. The new testnet started producing blocks after the queue started to be “flushed,” moving validators into the rollup. Because the network is fully decentralized, the initial flush could have been called by anyone. The network produced ~2k blocks before an invalid block made it to the chain and temporarily stalled block production. Block production is now restored and the network is healthy. This post explains what caused the issue and provides an update on the current status of the network. 

Note: if you are a network operator, you must upgrade to version 2.0.3 and restart your node to participate in the latest testnet. If you want to run a node, it’s easy to get started.

What’s included in the upgrade? 

This upgrade was a team-wide effort that optimized performance and implemented all the mechanisms needed to launch Aztec as a fully decentralized network from day 1. 

Feature highlights include: 

  • Improved node stability: The Aztec node software is now far more stable. Users will see far fewer crashes and increased performance in terms of attestations and blocks produced. This translates into a far better experience using testnet, as transactions get included much faster.
  • Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) keys: When a validator registers on the rollup, they also provide keys that allow BLS signature aggregation. This unlocks future optimizations where signatures can be combined via p2p communication, then verified on Ethereum, while proving that the signatures come from block proposers.
  • Low-memory proving mode: The client-side proving requirements have dropped dramatically from 3.7GB to 1.3GB through a new low-memory proving mode, enabling older mobile devices to send Aztec transactions and use apps like zkPassport. 
  • AVM performance: The Aztec Virtual Machine (AVM) performance has seen major improvements with constraint coverage jumping from 0% to approximately 90-95%, providing far more secure AVM proving and more realistic proving performance numbers from provers. 
  • Flexible key management: The system now supports flexible key management through keystores, multi-EOA support, and remote signers, eliminating the need to pass private keys through environment variables and representing a significant step toward institutional readiness. 
  • Redesigned slashing: Slashing has been redesigned to provide much better consensus guarantees. Further, the new configuration allows nodes not to penalize home stakers for short outages, such as 20-minute interruptions. 
  • Slashing Vetoer: The Slasher contract now has an explicit vetoer: an address that can prevent slashing. At Mainnet, the initial vetoer will be operated by an independent group of security researchers who will also provide security assessments on upgrades. This acts as a failsafe in the event that nodes are erroneously trying to slash other nodes due to a bug.

With these updates in place, we’re ready to test a feature-complete network. 

What happened after deployment? 

As mentioned above, block production started when someone called the flush function and a minimum number of operators from the queue were let into the validator set. 

Shortly thereafter, while testing the network, a member of the Aztec Labs team spun up a “bad” sequencer that produced an invalid block proposal. Specifically, one of the state trees in the proposal was tampered with. 

Initial block production 

The expectation was that this would be detected immediately and the block rejected. Instead, a bug was discovered in the validator code where the invalid block proposal wasn't checked thoroughly enough. In effect, the proposal got enough attestations, so it was posted to the rollup. Due to extra checks in the nodes, when the nodes pulled the invalid block from Ethereum, they detected the tampered tree and refused to sync it. This is a good outcome as it prevented the attack. Additionally, prover nodes refused to prove the epoch containing the invalid block. This allowed the rollup to prune the entire bad epoch away. After the prune, the invalid state was reset to the last known good block.

Block production stalled

The prune revealed another, smaller bug, where, after a failed block sync, a prune does not get processed correctly, requiring a node restart to clear up. This led to a 90-minute outage from the moment the block proposal was posted until the testnet recovered. The time was equally split between waiting for pruning to happen and for the nodes to restart in order to process the prune.

The Fix

Validators were correctly re-executing all transactions in the block proposals and verifying that the world state root matched the one in the block proposal, but they failed to check that intermediate tree roots, which are included in the proposal and posted to the rollup contract on L1, were also correct. The attack tweaked one of these intermediate roots while proposing a correct world state root, so it went unnoticed by the attestors. 

As mentioned above, even though the block made it through the initial attestation and was posted to L1, the invalid block was caught by the validators, and the entire epoch was never proven as provers refused to generate a proof for the inconsistent state. 

A fix was pushed that resolved this issue and ensured that invalid block proposals would be caught and rejected. A second fix was pushed that ensures inconsistent state is removed from the uncommitted cache of the world state.

Block production restored

What’s Next

Block production is currently running smoothly, and the network health has been restored. 

Operators who had previously upgraded to version 2.0.3 will need to restart their nodes. Any operator who has not upgraded to 2.0.3 should do so immediately. 

Attestation and Block Production rate on the new rollup

Slashing has also been functioning as expected. Below you can see the slashing signals for each round. A single signal can contain votes for multiple validators, but a validator's attester needs to receive 65 votes to be slashed.

Votes on slashing signals

Join us this Thursday, September 25, 2025, at 4 PM CET on the Discord Town Hall to hear more about the 2.0.3 upgrade. To stay up to date with the latest updates for network operators, join the Aztec Discord and follow Aztec on X.

Noir
Noir
18 Sep
xx min read

Just write “if”: Why Payy left Halo2 for Noir

The TL;DR:

Payy, a privacy-focused payment network, just rewrote its entire ZK architecture from Halo2 to Noir while keeping its network live, funds safe, and users happy. 

Code that took months to write now takes weeks (with MVPs built in as little as 30 minutes). Payy’s codebase shrank from thousands of lines to 250, and now their entire engineering team can actually work on its privacy infra. 

This is the story of how they transformed their ZK ecosystem from one bottlenecked by a single developer to a system their entire team can modify and maintain.

Starting with Halo2

Eighteen months ago, Payy faced a deceptively simple requirement: build a privacy-preserving payment network that actually works on phones. That requires client-side proving.

"Anyone who tells you they can give you privacy without the proof being on the phone is lying to you," Calum Moore - Payy's Technical Lead - states bluntly.

To make a private, mobile network work, they needed:

  • Mobile proof generation with sub-second performance
  • Minimal proof sizes for transmission over weak mobile signals
  • Low memory footprint for on-device proving
  • Ethereum verifier for on-chain settlement

To start, the team evaluated available ZK stacks through their zkbench framework:

STARKs (e.g., RISC Zero): Memory requirements made them a non-starter on mobile. Large proof sizes are unsuitable for mobile data transmission.

Circom with Groth16: Required trusted setup ceremonies for each circuit update. It had “abstracted a bit too early” and, as a result, is not high-level enough to develop comfortably, but not low-level enough for controls and optimizations, said Calum.

Halo2: Selected based on existing production deployments (ZCash, Scroll), small proof sizes, and an existing Ethereum verifier. As Calum admitted with the wisdom of hindsight: “Back a year and a half ago, there weren’t any other real options.”

Bus factor = 1 😳

Halo2 delivered on its promises: Payy successfully launched its network. But cracks started showing almost immediately.

First, they had to write their own chips from scratch. Then came the real fun: if statements.

"With Halo2, I'm building a chip, I'm passing this chip in... It's basically a container chip, so you'd set the value to zero or one depending on which way you want it to go. And, you'd zero out the previous value if you didn't want it to make a difference to the calculation," Calum explained, “when I’m writing in Noir, I just write ‘if’. "

With Halo2, writing an if statement (programming 101) required building custom chip infra. 

Binary decomposition, another fundamental operation for rollups, meant more custom chips. The Halo2 implementation quickly grew to thousands of lines of incomprehensible code.

And only Calum could touch any of it.

The Bottleneck

"It became this black box that no one could touch, no one could reason about, no one could verify," he recalls. "Obviously, we had it audited, and we were confident in that. But any changes could only be done by me, could only be verified by me or an auditor."

In engineering terms, this is called a bus factor of one: if Calum got hit by a bus (or took a vacation to Argentina), Payy's entire proving system would be frozen. "Those circuits are open source," Calum notes wryly, "but who's gonna be able to read the Halo2 circuits? Nobody."

Evaluating Noir: One day, in Argentina…

During a launch event in Argentina, "I was like, oh, I'll check out Noir again. See how it's going," Calum remembers. He'd been tracking Noir's progress for months, occasionally testing it out, waiting for it to be reliable.

"I wrote basically our entire client-side proof in about half an hour in Noir. And it probably took me - I don't know, three weeks to write that proof originally in Halo2."

Calum recreated Payy's client-side proof in Noir in 30 minutes. And when he tested the proving speed, without any optimization, they were seeing 2x speed improvements.

"I kind of internally… didn't want to tell my cofounder Sid that I'd already made my decision to move to Noir," Calum admits. "I hadn't broken it to him yet because it's hard to justify rewriting your proof system when you have a deployed network with a bunch of money already on the network and a bunch of users."

Rebuilding (Ship of Theseus-ing) Payy

Convincing a team to rewrite the core of a live financial network takes some evidence. The technical evaluation of Noir revealed improvements across every metric:

Proof Generation Time: Sub-0.5 second proof generation on iPhones. "We're obsessive about performance," Calum notes (they’re confident they can push it even further).

Code Complexity: Their entire ZK implementation compressed from thousands of lines of Halo2 to just 250 lines of Noir code. "With rollups, the logic isn't complex—it's more about the preciseness of the logic," Calum explains.

Composability: In Halo2, proof aggregation required hardwiring specific verifiers for each proof type. Noir offers a general-purpose verifier that accepts any proof of consistent size.

"We can have 100 different proving systems, which are hyper-efficient for the kind of application that we're doing," Calum explains. "Have them all aggregated by the same aggregation proof, and reason about whatever needs to be."

Migration Time

Initially, the goal was to "completely mirror our Halo2 proofs": no new features. This conservative approach meant they could verify correctness while maintaining a live network.

The migration preserved Payy's production architecture:

  • Rust core (According to Calum, "Writing a financial application in JavaScript is borderline irresponsible")
  • Three-proof system: client-side proof plus two aggregators  
  • Sparse Merkle tree with Poseidon hashing for state management

When things are transparent, they’re secure

"If you have your proofs in Noir, any person who understands even a little bit about logic or computers can go in and say, 'okay, I can kinda see what's happening here'," Calum notes.

The audit process completely transformed. With Halo2: "The auditors that are available to audit Halo2 are few and far between."

With Noir: "You could have an auditor that had no Noir experience do at least a 95% job."

Why? Most audit issues are logic errors, not ZK-specific bugs. When auditors can read your code, they find real problems instead of getting lost in implementation details.

Code Comparison

Halo2: Binary decomposition

  • Write a custom chip for binary decomposition
  • Implement constraint system manually
  • Handle grid placement and cell references
  • Manage witness generation separately
  • Debug at the circuit level when something goes wrong

Payy’s previous 383 line implementation of binary decomposition can be viewed here (pkg/zk-circuits/src/chips/binary_decomposition.rs).

Payy’s previous binary decomposition implementation

Meanwhile, binary decomposition is handled in Noir with the following single line.

pub fn to_le_bits<let N: u32>(self: Self) -> [u1; N]

(Source)

What's Next

With Noir's composable proof system, Payy can now build specialized provers for different operations, each optimized for its specific task.

"If statements are horrendous in SNARKs because you pay the cost of the if statement regardless of its run," Calum explains. But with Noir's approach, "you can split your application logic into separate proofs, and run whichever proof is for the specific application you're looking for."

Instead of one monolithic proof trying to handle every case, you can have specialized proofs, each perfect for its purpose.

The Bottom Line

"I fell a little bit in love with Halo2," Calum admits, "maybe it's Stockholm syndrome where you're like, you know, it's a love-hate relationship, and it's really hard. But at the same time, when you get a breakthrough with it, you're like, yes, I feel really good because I'm basically writing assembly-level ZK proofs."

“But now? I just write ‘if’.”

Technical Note: While "migrating from Halo2 to Noir" is shorthand that works for this article, technically Halo2 is an integrated proving system where circuits must be written directly in Rust using its constraint APIs, while Noir is a high-level language that compiles to an intermediate representation and can use various proving backends. Payy specifically moved from writing circuits in Halo2's low-level constraint system to writing them in Noir's high-level language, with Barretenberg (UltraHonk) as their proving backend.

Both tools ultimately enable developers to write circuits and generate proofs, but Noir's modular architecture separates circuit logic from the proving system - which is what made Payy's circuits so much more accessible to their entire team, and now allows them to swap out their proving system with minimal effort as proving systems improve.

Payy's code is open source and available for developers looking to learn from their implementation.

Aztec Network
Aztec Network
4 Sep
xx min read

A New Brand for a New Era of Aztec

After eight years of solving impossible problems, the next renaissance is here. 

We’re at a major inflection point, with both our tech and our builder community going through growth spurts. The purpose of this rebrand is simple: to draw attention to our full-stack privacy-native network and to elevate the rich community of builders who are creating a thriving ecosystem around it. 

For eight years, we’ve been obsessed with solving impossible challenges. We invented new cryptography (Plonk), created an intuitive programming language (Noir), and built the first decentralized network on Ethereum where privacy is native rather than an afterthought. 

It wasn't easy. But now, we're finally bringing that powerful network to life. Testnet is live with thousands of active users and projects that were technically impossible before Aztec.

Our community evolution mirrors our technical progress. What started as an intentionally small, highly engaged group of cracked developers is now welcoming waves of developers eager to build applications that mainstream users actually want and need.

Behind the Brand: A New Mental Model

A brand is more than aesthetics—it's a mental model that makes Aztec's spirit tangible. 

Our Mission: Start a Renaissance

Renaissance means "rebirth"—and that's exactly what happens when developers gain access to privacy-first infrastructure. We're witnessing the emergence of entirely new application categories, business models, and user experiences.

The faces of this renaissance are the builders we serve: the entrepreneurs building privacy-preserving DeFi, the activists building identity systems that protect user privacy, the enterprise architects tokenizing real-world assets, and the game developers creating experiences with hidden information.

Values Driving the Network

This next renaissance isn't just about technology—it's about the ethos behind the build. These aren't just our values. They're the shared DNA of every builder pushing the boundaries of what's possible on Aztec.

Agency: It’s what everyone deserves, and very few truly have: the ability to choose and take action for ourselves. On the Aztec Network, agency is native

Genius: That rare cocktail of existential thirst, extraordinary brilliance, and mind-bending creation. It’s fire that fuels our great leaps forward. 

Integrity: It’s the respect and compassion we show each other. Our commitment to attacking the hardest problems first, and the excellence we demand of any solution. 

Obsession: That highly concentrated insanity, extreme doggedness, and insatiable devotion that makes us tick. We believe in a different future—and we can make it happen, together. 

Visualizing the Next Renaissance

Just as our technology bridges different eras of cryptographic innovation, our new visual identity draws from multiple periods of human creativity and technological advancement. 

The Wordmark: Permissionless Party 

Our new wordmark embodies the diversity of our community and the permissionless nature of our network. Each letter was custom-drawn to reflect different pivotal moments in human communication and technological progress.

  • The A channels the bold architecture of Renaissance calligraphy—when new printing technologies democratized knowledge. 
  • The Z strides confidently into the digital age with clean, screen-optimized serifs. 
  • The T reaches back to antiquity, imagined as carved stone that bridges ancient and modern. 
  • The E embraces the dot-matrix aesthetic of early computing—when machines first began talking to each other. 
  • And the C fuses Renaissance geometric principles with contemporary precision.

Together, these letters tell the story of human innovation: each era building on the last, each breakthrough enabling the next renaissance. And now, we're building the infrastructure for the one that's coming.

The Icon: Layers of the Next Renaissance

We evolved our original icon to reflect this new chapter while honoring our foundation. The layered diamond structure tells the story:

  • Innermost layer: Sensitive data at the core
  • Black privacy layer: The network's native protection
  • Open third layer: Our permissionless builder community
  • Outermost layer: Mainstream adoption and real-world transformation

The architecture echoes a central plaza—the Roman forum, the Greek agora, the English commons, the American town square—places where people gather, exchange ideas, build relationships, and shape culture. It's a fitting symbol for the infrastructure enabling the next leap in human coordination and creativity.

Imagery: Global Genius 

From the Mughal and Edo periods to the Flemish and Italian Renaissance, our brand imagery draws from different cultures and eras of extraordinary human flourishing—periods when science, commerce, culture and technology converged to create unprecedented leaps forward. These visuals reflect both the universal nature of the Renaissance and the global reach of our network. 

But we're not just celebrating the past —we're creating the future: the infrastructure for humanity's next great creative and technological awakening, powered by privacy-native blockchain technology.

You’re Invited 

Join us to ask questions, learn more and dive into the lore.

Join Our Discord Town Hall. September 4th at 8 AM PT, then every Thursday at 7 AM PT. Come hear directly from our team, ask questions, and connect with other builders who are shaping the future of privacy-first applications.

Take your stance on privacy. Visit the privacy glyph generator to create your custom profile pic and build this new world with us.

Stay Connected. Visit the new website and to stay up-to-date on all things Noir and Aztec, make sure you’re following along on X.

The next renaissance is what you build on Aztec—and we can't wait to see what you'll create.

Aztec Network
Aztec Network
22 Jul
xx min read

Introducing the Adversarial Testnet

Aztec’s Public Testnet launched in May 2025.

Since then, we’ve been obsessively working toward our ultimate goal: launching the first fully decentralized privacy-preserving layer-2 (L2) network on Ethereum. This effort has involved a team of over 70 people, including world-renowned cryptographers and builders, with extensive collaboration from the Aztec community.

To make something private is one thing, but to also make it decentralized is another. Privacy is only half of the story. Every component of the Aztec Network will be decentralized from day one because decentralization is the foundation that allows privacy to be enforced by code, not by trust. This includes sequencers, which order and validate transactions, provers, which create privacy-preserving cryptographic proofs, and settlement on Ethereum, which finalizes transactions on the secure Ethereum mainnet to ensure trust and immutability.

Strong progress is being made by the community toward full decentralization. The Aztec Network now includes nearly 1,000 sequencers in its validator set, with 15,000 nodes spread across more than 50 countries on six continents. With this globally distributed network in place, the Aztec Network is ready for users to stress test and challenge its resilience.

Introducing the Adversarial Testnet

We're now entering a new phase: the Adversarial Testnet. This stage will test the resilience of the Aztec Testnet and its decentralization mechanisms.

The Adversarial Testnet introduces two key features: slashing, which penalizes validators for malicious or negligent behavior in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks, and a fully decentralized governance mechanism for protocol upgrades.

This phase will also simulate network attacks to test its ability to recover independently, ensuring it could continue to operate even if the core team and servers disappeared (see more on Vitalik’s “walkaway test” here). It also opens the validator set to more people using ZKPassport, a private identity verification app, to verify their identity online.  

Slashing on the Aztec Network

The Aztec Network testnet is decentralized, run by a permissionless network of sequencers.

The slashing upgrade tests one of the most fundamental mechanisms for removing inactive or malicious sequencers from the validator set, an essential step toward strengthening decentralization.

Similar to Ethereum, on the Aztec Network, any inactive or malicious sequencers will be slashed and removed from the validator set. Sequencers will be able to slash any validator that makes no attestations for an entire epoch or proposes an invalid block.

Three slashes will result in being removed from the validator set. Sequencers may rejoin the validator set at any time after getting slashed; they just need to rejoin the queue.

Decentralized Governance

In addition to testing network resilience when validators go offline and evaluating the slashing mechanisms, the Adversarial Testnet will also assess the robustness of the network’s decentralized governance during protocol upgrades.

Adversarial Testnet introduces changes to Aztec Network’s governance system.

Sequencers now have an even more central role, as they are the sole actors permitted to deposit assets into the Governance contract.

After the upgrade is defined and the proposed contracts are deployed, sequencers will vote on and implement the upgrade independently, without any involvement from Aztec Labs and/or the Aztec Foundation.

Start Your Plan of Attack  

Starting today, you can join the Adversarial Testnet to help battle-test Aztec’s decentralization and security. Anyone can compete in six categories for a chance to win exclusive Aztec swag, be featured on the Aztec X account, and earn a DappNode. The six challenge categories include:

  • Homestaker Sentinel: Earn 1 Aztec Dappnode by maximizing attestation and proposal success rates and volumes, and actively participating in governance.
  • The Slash Priest: Awarded to the participant who most effectively detects and penalizes misbehaving validators or nodes, helping to maintain network security by identifying and “slashing” bad actors.
  • High Attester: Recognizes the participant with the highest accuracy and volume of valid attestations, ensuring reliable and secure consensus during the adversarial testnet.
  • Proposer Commander: Awarded to the participant who consistently creates the most successful and timely proposals, driving efficient consensus.
  • Meme Lord: Celebrates the creator of the most creative and viral meme that captures the spirit of the adversarial testnet.
  • Content Chronicler: Honors the participant who produces the most engaging and insightful content documenting the adversarial testnet experience.

Performance will be tracked using Dashtec, a community-built dashboard that pulls data from publicly available sources. Dashtec displays a weighted score of your validator performance, which may be used to evaluate challenges and award prizes.

The dashboard offers detailed insights into sequencer performance through a stunning UI, allowing users to see exactly who is in the current validator set and providing a block-by-block view of every action taken by sequencers.

To join the validator set and start tracking your performance, click here. Join us on Thursday, July 31, 2025, at 4 pm CET on Discord for a Town Hall to hear more about the challenges and prizes. Who knows, we might even drop some alpha.

To stay up-to-date on all things Noir and Aztec, make sure you’re following along on X.