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Contributors identified a critical vulnerability in Aztec's V5 Alpha proving system, the kind of finding Alpha testing exists to surface, with the fix planned for V6.
Core contributors identified a critical vulnerability affecting the V5 Alpha proving system on 27 July 2026 through internal AI-assisted auditing.
V5 remains Alpha software. Critical findings can arise during this phase, and the audit process exists to identify them before broader deployment. This finding places V5 funds, applications, and contract state at risk.
Treat funds and applications on V5 as exposed to a protocol-level failure until contributors complete incident response work and operators carry out the required network actions.
An attacker may be able to exploit a flaw in the current V5 proving system by constructing a proof that passes verification for a transaction the network should reject. If accepted, that transaction could produce a state transition outside the rules V5 intends to enforce.
Contributors cannot determine whether anyone exploited the flaw before this finding. The affected system lacks the information needed to distinguish ordinary accepted transactions from transactions accepted through the flawed proving path. Historical chain activity cannot establish whether exploitation occurred or quantify its impact.
We expect application teams to prepare safeguards in the coming weeks.
Those safeguards may include changes to application controls, deployment procedures, user flows, and migration plans. We expect each team to assess its contracts and determine which protections fit its architecture and users.
We expect teams planning a V5 deployment to pause that work until contributors publish further guidance. We expect teams with live contracts to review their ability to limit user exposure, isolate affected functionality, and move users to fresh deployments if needed.
We expect applications that maintain administrative or emergency controls to assess whether those controls can reduce user risk during the incident timeframe.
Core contributors are working with operators, application teams, and bridge operators as applications add security guards around affected flows.
The findings from this incident will inform the V6 release, including circuit updates that prevent the network from accepting proofs tied to an affected proving system.
V5 launched as Alpha software, with V6 planned for later in 2026. Contributors will publish a security roadmap covering the remaining work and release path.
Reviewers have not identified other high-severity or critical V5 Alpha vulnerabilities at this time.
Internal and external human audits have completed, and contributors continue AI-assisted auditing. Alpha is the period for identifying faults before production deployment.
Dark Forest is a real-time strategy game played across a procedurally generated universe where most of the map is hidden. You cannot see rival players, their planets, or their fleets. You only know what you have explored. Everyone shares one universe, and nobody has the full picture.
In most onchain games, every position and every move is public, because the chain is public. Dark Forest used zero-knowledge proofs to break that assumption: players prove their moves are valid without revealing where those moves came from. The result is a game of hidden information running on a public network.
Dark Forest Aztec ports the original Dark Forest 0.6 to Aztec. It keeps the gameplay from the original and rebuilds the privacy layer on Aztec's programmable privacy.
A note before diving in: this is early, experimental software on Aztec Alpha V5. Treat it as an alpha and play accordingly.
You start on a single home planet with almost the entire map dark. To find anything you mine the universe, running a client that explores coordinates and reveals what sits there: unclaimed planets, resources, and eventually the edges of other players' territory.
You are never handed a view of the board. You earn it one region at a time, and everyone else works under the same fog.
Your home coordinates and your fleet movements are private state, expressed as first-class private notes on Aztec. Your location and where you send energy stay hidden, enforced in the contracts by zero-knowledge cryptography.
What sits onchain is a set of cryptographic commitments. Instead of storing every planet's full details in the open, the contracts store Poseidon2 hashes of entity state. When you make a move, your client supplies the full state, the contract checks it against the stored hash, applies the change under zero-knowledge constraints, and writes a new hash back. Full game state lives offchain and gets rebuilt from public logs by an indexer, which is what renders your map without exposing every player's position.
So you can prove you made a legal move from a planet you own without revealing where that planet is. Aztec applies the same principle to private payments and private contracts.
Four actions carry the game.
Explore. Your explorer sits in the bottom left. Set it running and it uncovers the map around you, surfacing planets, resources, and other players.
Send energy. Most planets produce energy. Click and drag from a planet you own toward a target to capture or weaken it.
Route silver. Asteroid fields produce silver. Move it to your planets and spend it on upgrades, or send it to a Spacetime Rip to convert it into score.
Hunt artifacts. Some planets hold artifacts. Your Gear ship discovers them. Once harvested, you deposit them on planets to boost stats.
Four stats drive most decisions.
Energy is the core resource. Planets generate it over time up to a capacity, and you spend it on everything: claiming planets, reinforcing your own, attacking rivals. Two details matter. Moves are taxed, so a flat percentage of a planet's total capacity burns every time you send energy, which discourages small frequent moves. And energy decays over distance, so send it too far and almost nothing arrives. A common rule of thumb is to let a planet fill to about 75%, then send it down to about 25%.
Defense reduces the damage incoming energy does when it lands. Higher-level planets often have lower defense, but they hold much more energy, so they still take more to capture. Defense matters most on front lines.
Range sets how far a planet can send energy. It governs how fast you expand and how efficiently you move energy inside your own empire, since shorter relative distances mean less decay. Good range also lets you strike deep into an opponent's territory.
Speed sets how quickly a move arrives. Usually secondary, though a fast strike can land before a rival reacts, and some playstyles reward capturing many nearby planets quickly.
Planets can also be upgraded with silver and enhanced with artifacts. Space types carry different multipliers, from mild Nebula to punishing Dead Space, so where a planet sits changes how it plays.
There is a scoreboard, and territory alone does not win it. This round scores two activities: discovering artifacts with your Gear ship, and withdrawing silver through Spacetime Rips.
Point values from the in-game help page:
Silver accrues one point at a time. A single Mythic artifact is worth twenty million of them, so artifact hunting decides rounds and silver withdrawal sets your floor.
Silver has two competing uses. Spend it on upgrades and your planets get stronger, extending range and hardening defense. Withdraw it through a Spacetime Rip and it becomes scored points, but it is gone. Every unit is a choice between building the empire and banking points.
Upgrades tend to win early, since a stronger empire reaches more asteroid fields and finds more artifacts. Late in a round that calculation flips, because a planet you never use is worth less than points already scored.
Artifacts do both jobs at once. They score on discovery, and once deposited they boost a planet's stats, which makes the next expedition easier.
Nothing happens until you find something to act on. Your explorer turns dark space into planets you can capture, asteroid fields you can mine, and artifact-bearing planets you can raid. Sitting still means no new energy, no silver, no score.
Exploring also buys information. The map you have uncovered is an advantage nobody else holds. Knowing where high-level planets sit, which asteroid fields are unclaimed, and where space types shift lets you plan further ahead than someone still working through their starting region.
You find other players as a byproduct. There is no player list. You explore outward until your revealed region touches territory someone already owns: a planet in another player's colors, sitting where you were about to expand. Their home coordinates stay private, so you learn something narrow. Someone is here, roughly this direction, holding this much. You infer the rest, and you have no way of knowing whether they found you first.
You have three broad options.
Stay quiet and keep growing. Nothing forces you to engage. Keep exploring elsewhere, keep routing silver, keep upgrading. Your positions stay private, so silence costs you only time, which is what you want if they are stronger. The risk is that they are doing the same thing faster.
Fortify the border. If the contact sits somewhere you cannot lose, spend energy hardening the planets facing them. Defense is worth most where an attack will actually land. This keeps the option to fight without committing to one.
Attack. Send enough energy to overwhelm the target's defense and the planet becomes yours, along with its production and its position as a staging post. Higher-level planets are the prize and take proportionally more to crack.
Attacking costs more than energy. A move that lands tells your rival where you strike from, and that you are close enough to be worth answering. Retaliation can then come from directions you have not explored, launched from planets you cannot see.
Everyone plays one shared universe in real time. No turns, no lobbies. Energy regenerates whether you are watching or not, moves stay in flight while you sleep, and rivals expand while you are away from the screen.
Most strategy games let you watch a threat approach. Here you tend to see the consequences: a planet you owned this morning in someone else's colors, an incoming move you notice once it is already close.
That produces a particular kind of paranoia. You are trying to find everyone else while avoiding being found, and every expansion is a strategic bet that the space ahead is empty.
Information becomes tradeable, because it is scarce. Players compare notes, warn each other about aggressive neighbors, and agree who expands where, then break those agreements when the scoreboard makes it worth breaking.
A fully onchain game where players cannot see each other's positions is hard to build, and building it well says something about the platform underneath.
Hidden state, private notes, and client-side proving are the same building blocks behind private applications across Aztec. Dark Forest is a way to watch them work.
Dark Forest Aztec is playable now as an alpha. Expect a learning curve; the original was famous for it. DFArchon maintains onboarding material and a community for new players. Round One is live. The universe is dark, and everyone else is out there somewhere. Go find them, quietly.
Gas on Aztec is known as Fee Juice and is used to pay for transaction costs. This is the same as $ETH on Ethereum. Some apps will handle transaction costs for you under the hood, but if you are using a browser extension wallet, you will not be able to send transactions without it. Fee Juice can be obtained by bridging the $AZTEC token on Ethereum to the Aztec Network L2. This means that under the hood, all activity that happens on Aztec is underpinned by the $AZTEC token bridged into the network. Some bridges like Shield (by human.tech) handle this for you, allowing you to allocate a portion of your bridged transaction to convert into Fee Juice and land in your wallet automatically.
Assets and transactions on the Aztec Network can be either public or private. If you bridge publicly, your tokens will arrive as public, traceable tokens visible to all. Privately bridging, on the other hand, will give you private assets that are visible only to you. These assets can then be sent privately to another user or wallet without ever revealing who you are, what tokens were sent, how many, or who the recipient is.
Like tokens on the Aztec Network, Fee Juice (gas) can also be public or private. The reason for this is that even if what you are sending is private, the gas you spend to execute that transaction could still be visible if you are using public Fee Juice, potentially revealing transaction patterns and activity. Private Fee Juice keeps your entire transaction footprint hidden. When you send a private transaction, you can use private Fee Juice, and when you send a public transaction, you can use public Fee Juice, which means your transaction costs are always aligned with the type of transaction you're making.
Aztec has native fee abstraction, which means apps could let you pay for transactions in any token you want, or cover your fees entirely. Apps like Nyx may choose to cover part or all of a user's transaction costs, or allow you to pay in tokens that are convenient for you. This means you will most likely never see Fee Juice in an app; instead, you'll pay in whatever makes sense for what you're doing, on your terms. Similarly, you might never even see an Aztec wallet at all, because the app itself becomes your interface that you connect to using your MetaMask wallet.
If you're using a browser extension like Azguard, you'll manage Fee Juice directly in your wallet alongside your private and public balances, converting between tokens as needed to cover transaction costs.
When you bridge tokens in, you'll need enough Fee Juice to cover the cost of your first transaction, then you'll need to monitor how much Fee Juice you have available to make transactions. Browser wallets will allow you to send either publicly or privately to other users and will default to using either public or private Fee Juice depending on the type of transaction. Both private Fee Juice and public Fee Juice will appear by default in your token list.
How you handle Fee Juice depends on where you're transacting: apps can abstract it away entirely and let you pay in any token, while a browser wallet like Azguard puts it in your hands to manage across public and private balances. Match your gas to your transaction, keep private activity private down to the fee, and you move on your terms.
The Aztec Network today activated Alpha V5, a major protocol upgrade passed by token-holder governance and executed onchain. Alpha V5 reduces private-transaction proving times by more than 2x compared to the previous version, lowers the cost of a fully private transaction by roughly 50%, resolves the critical issues found in V4, and sees the first wave of apps go live. Users can now send private transactions and earn yield on Aave simply by connecting their Ethereum wallets on Nyx, bridge from Ethereum to Aztec using Shield or TRAIN, privately collect NFTs on RavenHouse, or play Dark Forest Aztec, a hidden-information strategy game in a universe that lives entirely onchain.
"Alpha V5 continues Aztec's work at the frontier of client-side proving, with cryptographic breakthroughs that cut proving times by more than half this release," said Zac Williamson, Co-founder, Aztec Foundation. "We believe Aztec is now the fastest system in the world for proving a fully private transaction entirely on a user's own device, and every release moves the industry closer to private transactions at public transaction speeds."
As the only decentralized privacy L2, Aztec is the credibly neutral privacy layer for Ethereum. Aztec allows anyone to write smart contracts that include both private and public aspects – every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so no operator, sequencer, or intermediary can see the data. The Alpha V5 proving improvements come from cryptographic advances that make this client-side proving faster than any prior release. The network remains in alpha, but with V5 it is ready for teams to begin building and deploying applications.
Making private transactions practical comes down to how quickly a proof can be generated on a user's own device, without offloading that work to a server that would learn what the user is doing. On Alpha V5, proving a private token transfer natively now takes approximately 2.5 seconds on a consumer laptop, down from 5.2 seconds on V4, and about 6.8 seconds in a browser, down from 12.5 seconds. Across every measured transaction flow, client-side proving times improved by approximately 2x compared with V4.
Alpha V5 lowers ECDSA signature-verification cost by approximately 2x, speeds up Poseidon2 hashing by approximately 3x, and reduces the protocol circuit gate count by approximately 50% (gate count is the number of individual operations a proving circuit must perform, and it is the main driver of how long a proof takes to generate). Each of these lowers the amount of work a device performs to prove a transaction, and the reduction in gate count in particular compounds across every proof the network generates.
Alpha V5 launches the first wave of apps on a network where privacy is built into the protocol rather than managed by an operator. On other networks that claim privacy, transactions still pass through an operator or node that reads them in plaintext, or depend on a viewing key that a third party holds, so users rely on someone else to protect their data and to decide when it gets disclosed. On Aztec, every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so the app, the sequencer, and any operator never need to see the underlying data. Nyx is one of these apps, allowing users to privately send transactions and privately earn yield on Aave.
"On Ethereum, everything you do is public. That's why we built Nyx: a private account governed by your Ethereum wallet", said Nikhil, Co-founder of Nyx. "Now you can send, receive and earn in private. Nyx was the first app live on the Aztec Alpha, and we're excited to expand participation to more users with the added stability of Alpha V5."
Other apps on Alpha V5 include Azguard and Nethermind (wallets), Shield, TRAIN, and RavenHouse (bridges), and the Aztecscan block explorers. Also launching is Dark Forest Aztec, a game where users explore a universe, control planets, manage planetary energy, expand territory, and launch attacks through strategic play with private state and hidden actions.
Transaction fees on Aztec come from two main sources: the cost of proving a transaction and the cost of verifying the rollup proof on Ethereum. Alpha V5 reduces both. It lowers the network's proving-cost parameter by 50%, and it reduces the L1 gas required to verify a rollup proof by approximately 40%. Because rollup proofs are verified on Ethereum and that cost is shared across all transactions in a batch, the L1 reduction lowers fees for every user, while the lower proving-cost parameter reduces the per-transaction proving fee directly. Together, these bring the average cost of a fully private token transfer to under a $0.05 transaction cost.
Alpha V5 also hardens the network on several fronts. It resolves critical vulnerabilities found in Alpha V4 along with additional bugs discovered since launch. Aztec's bug bounty program on Cantina also drew more than 234 security researchers to participate. The network remains in alpha, and further bugs may surface as usage grows, but each release has closed the issues found in the last and strengthened the protocol against new ones. With the critical V4 issues resolved and these safeguards in place, Alpha V5 is stable enough for teams to begin building and deploying applications.
Alpha V5 is live now, view the Alpha V5 landing page for a full list of features, performance updates, and live apps to explore.
Aztec is the only decentralized, privacy-first Layer 2 on Ethereum. Developers write private and public logic in the same smart contract, and private functions are executed and proven on the user's own device, so no operator sees the underlying data. The protocol is upgraded through onchain governance, and the network settles to Ethereum. For more information, visit aztec.network.
On Ethereum today, each transaction reveals everything publicly. The token you moved, the size, the timing, the wallet it came from, every action you take. Given the limitations of this type of transparent network, the industry is now focusing on bringing privacy onchain as a top priority. The response to this has mostly been to enable private transactions that shield transfers in various ways. But when we look at how privacy works on Web2, it’s clear that users and developers need granular privacy controls: the ability to decide what is public or private and who is able to see different types of data.
Aztec was built so that one transaction can carry two halves. A private half that runs on your own device and never leaves it, and a public half that the network runs in the open. Apps can choose which aspects are private or public, and users can choose what they want to reveal and when.
This article will follow an example transaction on Aztec: a vote in an onchain election built on Aztec, where who you are and which candidate you chose stay private, while the running tally for each candidate stays public for anyone to verify.
Picture the vote you cast in our example as two aspects that seamlessly weave together. In the first step, you act in private: an app records your vote on your device and hands the network a proof that the vote is valid without revealing it. In the second, the network acts in public: it checks that proof, then adds one to the chosen candidate's public tally. It is one transaction: one part stays with you, one part goes to the network. Both parts end up recorded onchain, in two separate state trees, one private and one public. The walkthrough below follows how these two aspects work together and what this means for how your transaction lands onchain.
You open the voting app and connect an Aztec wallet. That first step looks like any onchain app. The difference is inside the wallet. An Aztec wallet carries a private execution environment, the PXE, pronounced "pixie", which runs on your phone or in your browser. The PXE is where the private half of your transaction executes, and where the proof of that work gets made, on your hardware, under your exclusive control.
Every account on Aztec is a smart contract rather than a bare key. That design, account abstraction, allows a wallet to authorize a transaction however its owner chooses without writing an identity onto the network for everyone to read. The wallet is the front door, and on Aztec you can decide if the door is open or closed, who you share your information with.
The voting app is a smart contract with two kinds of functions. The private functions run first, and they run inside your PXE. Your identity and the candidate you picked are the private inputs, and they stay on your device.
The only thing to leave your device is a proof confirming the legitimacy of your vote. Aztec's client-side proving system, Chonk, takes the private execution and produces a zero-knowledge proof: a compact cryptographic receipt that your vote followed the rules, that you are eligible, and have not voted before, while revealing nothing about who you are or who you voted for. Think of it as a sealed ballot the network can confirm is valid without opening it. The network learns only that a legitimate vote happened. It does not learn how you voted, or even which account voted.
This is the part that used to be too slow to be practical. Generating a proof on a phone was the bottleneck every privacy app hit. Aztec’s Chonk is purpose-built for fast proving on low-memory devices, both natively and in the browser, so the private half runs on the device in your hand instead of on someone else's server.
Some elements of a vote should be public. The tally is shared infrastructure, the number everyone relies on to trust the result. Thanks to programmable privacy on Aztec, the app marks that part public. Public functions live on the network and run in the open, the way functions do on Ethereum.
On Aztec, private and public logic live in the same contract, and the developer decides which is which, function by function and variable by variable. Programmable privacy is a dimmer, not a switch. The voting app turns it up on the individual ballot and turns it down on the running tally. That boundary is a design decision written into the contract, and it is the thing no transparent chain and no fixed-privacy chain can offer.
Your vote leaves your device as a bundle: the zero-knowledge proof of the private half, plus the call to the public function that updates the count. It goes to Aztec's sequencers, a decentralized set of thousands of independent operators, with more than 3,500 of them running the network today.
The sequencers do two jobs at once. They verify the proof of your private vote, confirming it is valid and eligible without seeing the choice behind it, and they run the public function that adds one to the chosen candidate and updates the public tally. Your ballot stays sealed. The count goes up by one for everyone to see. The same proof guarantees you cannot vote twice, even though no one learns which ballot is yours.
Aztec has two main state trees, and both live onchain. One holds private state, the other holds public state, so the full record of what happened sits on the network rather than on any one person's laptop. The two trees store each record in two different ways depending on if it needs to be private or public.
The private tree uses a UTXO model, the same note-based design used by Zcash. In this model, state is written as commitments: each entry is a sealed record that a valid vote was cast, with the voter and the choice kept private. Just like with Zcash or Bitcoin, you do not edit a private entry in place. You write a new one, and the design stops the same vote from being cast twice (old state is nullified). The vote stays private, and the record of a legitimate vote happening is onchain for the network to check.
The public tree uses an account-based model, the same shape Ethereum uses: values that update in place, readable by anyone. This is where each candidate's tally lives.
One transaction wrote information to both trees. The private tree recorded that you voted, sealed. The public tree recorded the new totals, in the open. Everything is onchain. The difference between the two trees is how much each one reveals.
Every private app on Aztec writes into that same private tree. A vote, a payment, and a payroll run all land in one shared record of activity, so each user's privacy grows stronger as the network grows, instead of splitting into a separate pool for every app.
Aztec is an L2 on Ethereum, so everything settles to Ethereum L1. A sequencer on Aztec gathers transactions into a proposed block. Other sequencers validate it before it goes to Ethereum's pending chain. At that point the block sits on Ethereum, ordered and recorded, waiting for its proof. The network has agreed on what happened and the proposed block is just waiting a final proof.
Proving a block is its own job, and on Aztec, it belongs to no one in particular. A decentralized, permissionless set of provers competes to take a full epoch, a 32-block stretch of the chain, and compresses it into a single zero-knowledge proof of the entire epoch. Anyone with the hardware can run a prover and bid for the work. There is no privileged operator, no committee you have to trust, no outside network holding a key.
That openness is the whole point of a privacy layer. A system that protects your data but routes it through one trusted server has only moved the exposure rather than removed it. Aztec keeps proving permissionless and your private inputs on your device, thereby avoiding any exposure.
The economics land in the voter's favor too. As an L2 network, Aztec spreads the cost of that one L1 proof across thousands of transactions in the rollup, so a vote costs pennies, not the millions of gas a private proof would cost verified alone on Ethereum.
A prover then posts the epoch proof to Ethereum's proven chain, and the Aztec state is final. Ethereum verifies one proof and inherits the correctness of everything inside it. Aztec extends Ethereum and settles to Ethereum, so your hybrid transaction carries Ethereum's security without carrying Ethereum's enforced transparency.
Anyone can now verify that the result is valid and that every counted vote was legitimate. No one can see how any individual voted. The tally is on the shared ledger where it belongs, and your ballot stayed yours the whole way through.
For the voter, their ballot was never a broadcast. The candidate you chose stayed yours, with no record tying your wallet to a name for anyone to read later, and you can still check that your vote was counted and the result is honest. You took part without your choice becoming data for systems built to act on it.
For a founder, the election app in this walkthrough is easy to implement without needing to build extensive custom code. Secret ballots with a public, verifiable count, in one contract, is a product category that opens up only because the boundary is programmable. You can build governance, elections, and polls where people vote without fear and the result still proves itself. And of course you can build anything that requires both public and private state to work seamlessly together.
For an infrastructure provider, the same machinery serves clients who need a result they can stand behind without exposing the people who produced it. Selective disclosure lets a client prove exactly what a counterparty needs to see, the count and the integrity of the process, and protect everything else, on their own terms. That is a guarantee a transparent chain cannot make.
A real vote needs two things at once: a secret ballot and a count anyone can check. A transparent chain makes you give up the first to get the second. On Aztec, you get both. The tally settled on Ethereum for anyone to verify, and how you voted stayed yours. The infrastructure is in place, what will you create with it?
The Aztec Network today activated Alpha V5, a major protocol upgrade passed by token-holder governance and executed onchain. Alpha V5 reduces private-transaction proving times by more than 2x compared to the previous version, lowers the cost of a fully private transaction by roughly 50%, resolves the critical issues found in V4, and sees the first wave of apps go live. Users can now send private transactions and earn yield on Aave simply by connecting their Ethereum wallets on Nyx, bridge from Ethereum to Aztec using Shield or TRAIN, privately collect NFTs on RavenHouse, or play Dark Forest Aztec, a hidden-information strategy game in a universe that lives entirely onchain.
"Alpha V5 continues Aztec's work at the frontier of client-side proving, with cryptographic breakthroughs that cut proving times by more than half this release," said Zac Williamson, Co-founder, Aztec Foundation. "We believe Aztec is now the fastest system in the world for proving a fully private transaction entirely on a user's own device, and every release moves the industry closer to private transactions at public transaction speeds."
As the only decentralized privacy L2, Aztec is the credibly neutral privacy layer for Ethereum. Aztec allows anyone to write smart contracts that include both private and public aspects – every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so no operator, sequencer, or intermediary can see the data. The Alpha V5 proving improvements come from cryptographic advances that make this client-side proving faster than any prior release. The network remains in alpha, but with V5 it is ready for teams to begin building and deploying applications.
Making private transactions practical comes down to how quickly a proof can be generated on a user's own device, without offloading that work to a server that would learn what the user is doing. On Alpha V5, proving a private token transfer natively now takes approximately 2.5 seconds on a consumer laptop, down from 5.2 seconds on V4, and about 6.8 seconds in a browser, down from 12.5 seconds. Across every measured transaction flow, client-side proving times improved by approximately 2x compared with V4.
Alpha V5 lowers ECDSA signature-verification cost by approximately 2x, speeds up Poseidon2 hashing by approximately 3x, and reduces the protocol circuit gate count by approximately 50% (gate count is the number of individual operations a proving circuit must perform, and it is the main driver of how long a proof takes to generate). Each of these lowers the amount of work a device performs to prove a transaction, and the reduction in gate count in particular compounds across every proof the network generates.
Alpha V5 launches the first wave of apps on a network where privacy is built into the protocol rather than managed by an operator. On other networks that claim privacy, transactions still pass through an operator or node that reads them in plaintext, or depend on a viewing key that a third party holds, so users rely on someone else to protect their data and to decide when it gets disclosed. On Aztec, every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so the app, the sequencer, and any operator never need to see the underlying data. Nyx is one of these apps, allowing users to privately send transactions and privately earn yield on Aave.
"On Ethereum, everything you do is public. That's why we built Nyx: a private account governed by your Ethereum wallet", said Nikhil, Co-founder of Nyx. "Now you can send, receive and earn in private. Nyx was the first app live on the Aztec Alpha, and we're excited to expand participation to more users with the added stability of Alpha V5."
Other apps on Alpha V5 include Azguard and Nethermind (wallets), Shield, TRAIN, and RavenHouse (bridges), and the Aztecscan block explorers. Also launching is Dark Forest Aztec, a game where users explore a universe, control planets, manage planetary energy, expand territory, and launch attacks through strategic play with private state and hidden actions.
Transaction fees on Aztec come from two main sources: the cost of proving a transaction and the cost of verifying the rollup proof on Ethereum. Alpha V5 reduces both. It lowers the network's proving-cost parameter by 50%, and it reduces the L1 gas required to verify a rollup proof by approximately 40%. Because rollup proofs are verified on Ethereum and that cost is shared across all transactions in a batch, the L1 reduction lowers fees for every user, while the lower proving-cost parameter reduces the per-transaction proving fee directly. Together, these bring the average cost of a fully private token transfer to under a $0.05 transaction cost.
Alpha V5 also hardens the network on several fronts. It resolves critical vulnerabilities found in Alpha V4 along with additional bugs discovered since launch. Aztec's bug bounty program on Cantina also drew more than 234 security researchers to participate. The network remains in alpha, and further bugs may surface as usage grows, but each release has closed the issues found in the last and strengthened the protocol against new ones. With the critical V4 issues resolved and these safeguards in place, Alpha V5 is stable enough for teams to begin building and deploying applications.
Alpha V5 is live now, view the Alpha V5 landing page for a full list of features, performance updates, and live apps to explore.
Aztec is the only decentralized, privacy-first Layer 2 on Ethereum. Developers write private and public logic in the same smart contract, and private functions are executed and proven on the user's own device, so no operator sees the underlying data. The protocol is upgraded through onchain governance, and the network settles to Ethereum. For more information, visit aztec.network.
Crypto is in a long night. It is no secret that the industry is facing challenging circumstances and there has been a clear consolidation of the industry. Right now we are seeing a focus on real traction, demonstrable value projects shipping practical solutions that will meaningfully reach users.
Some of that discipline is overdue. However, in times like these the properties that made crypto structurally different begin to look expendable. Decentralization slows you down. It makes upgrades harder. It makes institutional sales harder. It removes the control surfaces that the existing financial world knows how to buy.
We used to accept those costs as the price of building something durable. But, in a famine, they look like unaffordable affectations. Discarding them wholesale, however, is like selling the land out from under our feet.
Permissionless, uncensorable transaction networks with rich composability - this is the clay from which our industry was grown. The long term commercial health of our industry depends on preserving these properties in an age of privacy and institutional adoption.
These trade-offs become more challenging and pernicious when privacy is involved. Privacy is the narrative for crypto in 2026, and for good reason. It’s the missing piece that will deliver the traction and real use-cases that the industry so desperately needs.
The challenges of decentralization multiply under the constraints of privacy and what we are seeing in the industry is not a pivot, but a complete capitulation of all of the differentiable value that made crypto valuable.
I have spent nearly a decade building a network that marries programmable privacy with decentralization. A network where users keep their data, where applications are composable with one another, where transactions can settle without a privileged party learning everyone’s business or deciding which products are allowed to exist. That required new cryptography, new programming models, new state architecture, new wallets, and a fairly insane number of tradeoffs that are invisible until you try to build the thing yourself. There are easier products to ship.
A centralized privacy service can give institutions something legible quickly, replicating how the existing financial sector works: a responsible operator, a viewing key, a way to block transactions, a way to explain the whole thing to a risk committee. Some of these products will be useful. Some will be good businesses. But they are not the thing we came here to build.
Institutional and enterprise adoption is one of the core growth areas in this crypto-winter and the playbook is simple: use the language of crypto as a skin-suit to sell products and services that pattern match onto existing financial rails, with their need for complete visibility, censorship, centralized network operators and all of the liabilities this incurs.
This is a tempting bargain because it shortens the path to adoption. It gives buyers and regulators a shape they understand. A company. A contract. A switch. But the moment you accept that bargain, the system changes character. It may still be encrypted. It may still contain proofs. It may still call itself private. But, it now behaves like and is an operated service.
There is a party with privileged knowledge and privileged control. Builders must shape themselves around it. Institutions negotiate with it. Regulators may pressure it. Attackers target it. Users ultimately depend on it. By a backdoor I mean something specific: a network or protocol-level viewing key where the product developer does not control who can see their users’ data, especially when paired with network-level controls that can block transactions or ban smart contracts entirely. I do not mean application-level controls. I do not mean user-authorised disclosure. I do not mean a dapp deciding that users must prove something before using it. Regulated applications will need rules. The issue is that the disclosure boundary of your application belongs to somebody else, and the same layer that sees can also decide whether your users are allowed to transact. In short, users lack a platform that has credible neutrality.
Privacy on top of centralized rails is fatal. If one party can see everything and stop anything, that party may be treated as responsible for seeing and stopping.
This compounds into substantial platform risk. If an entity builds on top of such a system they must surrender visibility and control to the network operator to satisfy their liabilities without consideration for yours. Decentralization and ultimately credible neutrality is the difference between whether you own durable infrastructure or are renting a service whose rules can change on a whim. Worse, you cannot “just build things”. For novel transaction flows approval must be sought and granted. Tell me, would Ethereum have grown if every smart contract deployment required approval from the Ethereum Foundation?
Privacy needs the same freedom. A private credit market, for example, touches identity, collateral, repayment history, payment flows, liquidation logic, lender disclosures, auditor access and borrower privacy. If every component lives inside a different permissioned service, each with its own operator and viewing assumptions, that is a bureaucratic friction that negates blockchain’s core value proposition; composability.
A decentralized and credibly neutral privacy network prevents the settlement layer from becoming the single place where all surveillance and censorship obligations naturally accumulate. It allows product developers to scope their code to satisfy their own narrow requirements without consideration for the obligations of a centralized operator.
A lot of today’s privacy narrative treats architecture as if it were a detail. It is not. You cannot take a transparent ledger, staple confidentiality onto the edge, add a viewing key for comfort, and expect to get programmable private infrastructure.
If the state model is not private from the ground up you get wrappers, third party tools, data custodians, ad hoc disclosure paths and a pile of assumptions that every application drags into the next. Developers do not get a normal programming model where private contracts can call private contracts and users keep state on their own devices. They do not get composability.
The difference matters. In a real private execution environment, users generate transactions locally. They do not outsource their intent to a third party who learns what they are doing. Private contracts interact through a state model designed for privacy. The network settles proofs without becoming the party that knows everyone’s business. Privacy is part of the architecture.
This is why Aztec has taken so long. We built something that makes programmable private state and decentralised settlement live inside the same system. That means proving systems that run on consumer hardware, a transaction architecture built around local private execution, and a programming model where privacy is idiomatic and just works out of the box.
A centralized service can skip much of this. It can hold the key, run the prover, approve the flow and call the result privacy. It gets to market faster because it is not trying to arrive at the same place.
Adding decentralization does not make obligations disappear. Applications, issuers, frontends, custodians and regulated businesses will continue to exist in a web of obligations and responsibilities. Anyone pretending otherwise is unserious.
The question is where those obligations live. If they are pushed into the settlement layer, the settlement layer is no longer credibly neutral. It needs visibility into everyone and controls over everyone.
The better answer is selective disclosure. Users and applications should prove specific facts to specific parties for specific purposes. A regulated application may need to know that a user passed a check, that a transaction satisfies a policy, or that an auditor can inspect a particular flow. None of that requires the base network to hold a permanent key into everyone’s activity.
This will be harder to explain to the existing world. New infrastructure always fails to fit the categories built for the old infrastructure. Bitcoin did not arrive as a neatly regulated bank product. Ethereum did not wait for every lawyer to understand smart contracts. Stablecoins and DeFi forced institutions, regulators and users to develop new language around rails that kept existing.
If the standard for privacy infrastructure is to plug into the old world without changing anything, the answer will always be a service with a backdoor. And the result will be to catch crumbs falling from the tables of the old world.
The market we should be building is, well, a market. A private financial system that compounds: assets, liquidity, identity, credentials, credit and applications interacting through a shared settlement layer without forcing users to surrender their data to whoever sits in the middle.
Traditional finance is built out of vertically integrated information silos. Those silos are its moat. Banks, exchanges, custodians, payment processors and data brokers all benefit from controlling the information that flows through them. A global private settlement layer attacks that advantage directly. It lets liquidity and credentials move while outsourcing information custody to neutral cryptographic infrastructure.
A company wants a moat. A settlement layer wants surface area. A permissioned privacy provider can ration access, raise fees, exclude applications, shape disclosure rules and define acceptable use around its own risk tolerance. These are products pretending to be networks, and not durable financial infrastructure. What bothers me is this compounding category confusion. Networks adding protocol-level viewing keys and transaction controls are using the same language as decentralised programmable privacy, and commentators are treating them as variations of the same thing. They are not.
We have spent nine years walking the hard road. Now, just as we are close, the market has lost faith. Everyone is reaching for whatever lifeline looks immediate. Some of those lifelines will be real. Some will make money. But if crypto responds to its long night by rebuilding financial privacy as permissioned services, then we will have survived by surrendering the property that made the industry worth building.
Markets can grow when the platform is removed from the position where it can dictate the rules. It would be perverse to forget that lesson while building privacy, the domain where control over information matters most.
Crypto is in a famine. The land is struggling. We could sell our land for a pittance and survive the season. But the famine will pass, and when it does the land will blossom again. Without the land we are nothing.
We have struggled immensely to create a permissionless network that can marry privacy with decentralisation: an indestructible network whose users cannot be surveilled and whose transactions cannot be censored. This is the soil we have to grow our crops. To surrender a backdoor or a centralized operator for temporary relief is to sell our land for the price of a stablecoin. And we cannot sell the land.
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Privacy has become a baseline requirement for L1s and L2s who care about bringing real-world users onchain. Users don't want their activity broadcast to competitors or the general public, but applications operating at scale also need some form of auditability, whether for regulators, compliance requirements, or tax reporting. Selective disclosure resolves that tension: privacy by default, with the ability to prove specific facts when required. What separates these networks is not whether they offer that switch, but who gets to hold it.
Aztec, Canton, Starknet, Tempo, and zkSync all offer some form of privacy with selective disclosure, but under the hood they make fundamentally different architectural decisions about who can see your data and who can turn your privacy off. Those decisions determine whether your privacy stays under your own control or sits behind a switch that someone else operates.
Three questions reveal where these networks actually diverge:
The answers determine whether your privacy off-switch is held by a policy, by an operator's good behavior, or by you alone through a cryptographic proof. As you'll see in this post, there are legitimate reasons to use each one with different tradeoffs. Aztec is the only network, however, where that switch stays in the user's hands, answering all three questions without putting a permissioned set of operators or a standing viewing key in control of your privacy. That gives developers the flexibility to build apps that comply with applicable laws while still keeping full privacy under the user's control.
This article will compare the privacy approaches of Aztec, Canton, Starknet, Tempo, and zkSync to give developers insight into the privacy tradeoffs of each network.
Here’s how each network handles the selective disclosure privacy off-switch, and who has control over your privacy:
Each of these networks offers privacy with selective disclosure, but each rests on a different network design with its own tradeoffs. We have ordered them by who holds your privacy off-switch, starting with designs where a third party controls access to your data and ending with designs where that control stays with you. At the top, the switch sits behind a policy promise and an honest operator, and further down it is replaced by proofs that the user generates and controls.
Canton keeps data private by controlling viewing permissions for the various actors on its network. A transaction splits into per-participant views, so each party receives only the sub-transactions that name it, and the parts it is not entitled to never reach it. The sequencer and mediator move those views without reading them, which is real privacy against those roles.
However, the data is still read in plaintext by the participant nodes that host the relevant parties, and in the common regulated-asset pattern where the issuer is a signatory on its own token, the issuer's node sees every transfer. The harder gap is verification, because no third party can reconstruct the global ledger, so correctness rests on the confirming nodes staying honest and their keys staying safe. In practice the off-switch sits with those nodes rather than with you, since you cannot see when your data is read and cannot stop it.
Tempo is designed for payments and uses validity proofs to verify that each zone is executing correctly, while still giving the zone operator full plaintext visibility into every transaction within that zone. Privacy comes from Tempo Zones, which are parallel execution environments connected to the Tempo mainnet.
By design, the zone operator has visibility into all transactions within the zone, while users see only their own and the public sees only a proof that the zone is valid. Token issuers set compliance controls, allowlists, blocklists, and freezes, enforced across zones. The mainnet checks each zone's validity, so execution is verified, while the operator still reads every transaction in plaintext and holds the off-switch over what is revealed. Your privacy is from the public, not from the operator.
zkSync Prividium adds the verifiability piece that Canton lacks. Every batch produces a validity proof settled to Ethereum, so a compromised operator cannot forge state or mint tokens from nothing without also forging a proof, which it cannot do. The tradeoff is that the operator processes every transaction in plaintext and decides who sees what, which means the off-switch stays with the operator and your privacy is from the outside world rather than from the operator itself.
This tradeoff has legitimate uses in high-trust institutional environments. If Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo are transacting on a shared network, a zone where BofA's infrastructure processes BofA-originated transactions satisfies internal control requirements while still delivering genuine ZK privacy from the other banks and the rest of the world. Where this model breaks down is in lower-trust environments where giving an operator full plaintext access and the switch that comes with it holds back product design possibilities.
Starknet's STRK20 breaks from relying on an operator for privacy. It shields ERC-20 balances and transfers in a privacy pool, and every private transaction carries a zero-knowledge proof generated client-side, so no operator sees your plaintext in order to build it.
Disclosure is where STRK20 diverges from Aztec. To join the Starknet Privacy Pool, you register an encrypted viewing key onchain, and it sits there for the life of your participation. On a regulatory request, a designated auditing entity can decrypt that key and trace your complete transaction history, forwards and backwards. StarkWare calls this ‘not a backdoor’ but a carefully scoped access mechanism, and the safeguard is a policy promise that the auditor decrypts only when required. The privacy is cryptographic, but the off-switch is a standing key that someone else holds and can flip whether or not you are watching.
On Aztec your private state lives as encrypted private data that only you can decrypt. The contract developer can choose what state is public and what is private, and whether your encrypted private data is emitted onchain as a private log or shared off-chain instead.
Your transactions get proven client-side on your own device, so no sequencer or operator sees your unencrypted private data. Those proofs settle to Ethereum, which gives the same integrity anchor marketed by Prividium, with every transaction verified and no forged state, but without a single operator who reads your data. The base protocol decentralizes sequencing, proving, and governance, so there is no operator to choose and trust in the first place.
Disclosure is your choice too: you decide who learns your private data, and whether they learn it in encrypted or decrypted form. To grant discovery without readability, you share an app-specific tagging secret that lets an auditor find your data in encrypted form without being able to decrypt and read it. This is enough to prove things calculated from that data, such as a tax basis or a profit and loss figure. Granting permission to actually read the data works differently. There's no per-contract read key you can hand out, because decryption uses your master viewing key, which would unlock all your data across every contract. So instead of sharing a key, you share the data itself, plus a proof that your plaintext is what encrypts to the on-chain ciphertext.
Aztec has true selective disclosure in that you can selectively share it, and nothing else you don’t need to. This is app specific, meaning that private data discoverability access on one app does not grant access on another. Most importantly, the off-switch stays in your hands, and you never need to trust the network to handle access to any of your private data and activity.
This is not just conceptual: here is a working proof-of-concept of this model on Aztec. PrivPNL takes you from private DEX trades through a tagging-key disclosure to a browser-generated ZK proof of your PnL. The auditor verifies a proof while the prover only has to reveal the amount they owe, and your portfolio stays private.
Canton keeps the switch with the participant nodes that read your data in plaintext, so disclosure rests on those nodes staying honest rather than on anything you control. Tempo similarly gives the off-switch to a zone-based node operator, but allows you to verify the correctness of transactions using validity proofs. Prividium hardens that promise with a proof settled to Ethereum, a real improvement, but the operator still reads every transaction and still decides who sees what. This can work well for large institutions, but small to medium sized enterprises are left with the same privacy as their current banks unless they run their own Prividium nodes. STRK20 moves the switch into a standing viewing key and asks you to trust that a designated auditor reaches for it only when needed. In each of these models the real question is not whether your privacy can be switched off, but who gets to do the switching, and whether you would even know it happened.
Aztec takes the operator and the standing key out of the question entirely. You keep the data, you generate the proof, and you disclose the result, one fact at a time and only when you choose to. The off-switch never leaves your hands, and no operator, auditor, or node can reach it on your behalf. This is one of the benefits of a network that offers fully programmable, privacy-preserving smart contracts that put you in control.
Selective disclosure is how privacy survives contact with a regulator, and the model you pick decides who can open your history when you are not looking. On Aztec, that answer is no one but you.
Dive into the technical details: Try a live demo of selective disclosure on Aztec and read the technical article on how it was built.
Integrate with Aztec: Reach out if you are interested in integrating privacy into your project.
Alpha is live: a fully feature-complete, privacy-first network. The infrastructure is in place, privacy is native to the protocol, and developers can now build truly private applications.
Nine years ago, we set out to redesign blockchain for privacy. The goal: create a system institutions can adopt while giving users true control of their digital lives. Privacy band-aids are coming to Ethereum (someday), but it’s clear we need privacy now, and there’s an arms race underway to build it. Privacy is complex, it’s not a feature you can bolt-on as an afterthought. It demands a ground-up approach, deep tech stack integration, and complete decentralization.
In November 2025, the Aztec Ignition Chain went live as the first decentralized L2 on Ethereum, it’s the coordination layer that the execution layer sits on top of. The network is not operated by the Aztec Labs or the Aztec Foundation, it’s run by the community, making it the true backbone of Aztec.
With the infrastructure in place and a unanimous community vote, the network enters Alpha.
Alpha is the first Layer 2 with a full execution environment for private smart contracts. All accounts, transactions, and the execution itself can be completely private. Developers can now choose what they want public and what they want to keep private while building with the three privacy pillars we have in place across data, identity, and compute.
These privacy pillars, which can be used individually or combined, break down into three core layers:
Alpha is feature complete–meaning this is the only full-stack solution for adding privacy to your business or application. You build, and Aztec handles the cryptography under the hood.
It’s Composable. Private-preserving contracts are not isolated; they can talk to each other and seamlessly blend both private and public state across contracts. Privacy can be preserved across contract calls for full callstack privacy.
No backdoor access. Aztec is the only decentralized L2, and is launching as a fully decentralized rollup with a Layer 1 escape hatch.
It’s Compliant. Companies are missing out on the benefits of blockchains because transparent chains expose user data, while private networks protect it, but still offer fully customizable controls. Now they can build compliant apps that move value around the world instantly.
Developers can explore our privacy primitives across data, identity, and compute and start building with them using the documentation here. Note that this is an early version of the network with known vulnerabilities, see this post for details. While this is the first iteration of the network, there will be several upgrades that secure and harden the network on our path to Beta. If you’d like to learn more about how you can integrate privacy into your project, reach out here.
To hear directly from our Cofounders, join our live from Cannes Q&A on Tuesday, March 31st at 9:30 am ET. Follow us on X to get the latest updates from the Aztec Network.
The $AZTEC token sale was conducted entirely onchain to maximize transparency and fair distribution. Next steps for holders are as follows:
The $AZTEC token sale has come to a close– the sale was conducted entirely onchain, and the power is now in your hands. Over 16.7k people participated, with 19,476 ETH raised. A huge thank you to our community and everyone who participated– you all really showed up for privacy. 50% of the capital committed has come from the community of users, testnet operators and creators!
Now that you have your tokens, what’s next? This guide walks you through the next steps leading up to TGE, showing you how to withdraw, stake, and vote with your tokens.
The $AZTEC sale was conducted onchain to ensure that you have control over your own tokens from day 1 (even before tokens become transferable at TGE).
The team has no control over your tokens. You will be self-custodying them in a smart contract known as the Token Vault on the Ethereum mainnet ahead of TGE.
Your Token Vault contract will:
To create and withdraw your tokens to your Token Vault, simply go to the sale website and click on ‘Create Token Vault.’ Any unused ETH from your bids will be returned to your wallet in the process of creating your Token Vault.
If you have 200,000+ tokens, you are eligible to start staking and earning block rewards today.
You can stake by connecting your Token Vault to the staking dashboard, just select a provider to delegate your stake. Alternatively, you can run your own sequencer node.
If your Token Vault holds 200,000+ tokens, you must stake in order to withdraw your tokens after TGE. If your Token Vault holds less than 200,000 tokens, you can withdraw without any additional steps at TGE
Fractional staking for anyone with less than 200,000 tokens is not currently supported, but multiple external projects are already working to offer this in the future.
TGE is triggered by an onchain governance vote, which can happen as early as February 11th, 2026.
At TGE, 100% of tokens from the token sale will be transferable. Only token sale participants and genesis sequencers can participate in the TGE vote, and only tokens purchased in the sale will become transferrable.
Community members discuss potential votes on the governance forum. If the community agrees, sequencers signal to start a vote with their block proposals. Once enough sequencers agree, the vote goes onchain for eligible token holders.
Voting lasts 7 days, requires participation of at least 100,000,000 $AZTEC tokens, and passes if 2/3 vote yes.
Following a successful yes vote, anyone can execute the proposal after a 7-day execution delay, triggering TGE.
At TGE, the following tokens will be 100% unlocked and available for trading:
Join us Thursday, December 11th at 3 pm UTC for the next Discord Town Hall–AMA style on next steps for token holders. Follow Aztec on X to stay up to date on the latest developments.
We invented the math. We wrote the language. Proved the concept and now, we’re opening registration and bidding for the $AZTEC token today, starting at 3 pm CET.
The community-first distribution offers a starting floor price based on a $350 million fully diluted valuation (FDV), representing an approximate 75% discount to the implied network valuation (based on the latest valuation from Aztec Labs’ equity financings). The auction also features per-user participation caps to give community members genuine, bid-clearing opportunities to participate daily through the entirety of the auction.
The token auction portal is live at: sale.aztec.network
We’ve taken the community access that made the 2017 ICO era great and made it even better.
For the past several months, we've worked closely with Uniswap Labs as core contributors on the CCA protocol, a set of smart contracts that challenge traditional token distribution mechanisms to prioritize fair access, permissionless, on-chain access to community members and the general public pre-launch. This means that on day 1 of the unlock, 100% of the community's $AZTEC tokens will be unlocked.
This model is values-aligned with our Core team and addresses the current challenges in token distribution, where retail participants often face unfair disadvantages against whales and institutions that hold large amounts of money.
Early contributors and long-standing community members, including genesis sequencers, OG Aztec Connect users, network operators, and community members, can start bidding today, ahead of the public auction, giving those who are whitelisted a head start and early advantage for competitive pricing. Community members can participate by visiting the token sale site to verify eligibility and mint a soul-bound NFT that confirms participation rights.
To read more about Aztec’s fair-access token sale, visit the economic and technical whitepapers and the token regulatory report.
Discount Price Disclaimer: Any reference to a prior valuation or percentage discount is provided solely to inform potential purchasers of how the initial floor price for the token sale was calculated. Equity financing valuations were determined under specific circumstances that are not comparable to this offering. They do not represent, and should not be relied upon as, the current or future market value of the tokens, nor as an indication of potential returns. The price of tokens may fluctuate substantially, the token may lose its value in part or in full, and purchasers should make independent assessments without reliance on past valuations. No representation or warranty is made that any purchaser will achieve profits or recover the purchase price.
Information for Persons in the UK: This communication is directed only at persons outside the UK. Persons in the UK are not permitted to participate in the token sale and must not act upon this communication.
MiCA Disclaimer: Any crypto-asset marketing communications made from this account have not been reviewed or approved by any competent authority in any Member State of the European Union. Aztec Foundation as the offeror of the crypto-asset is solely responsible for the content of such crypto-asset marketing communications. The Aztec MiCA white paper has been published and is available here. The Aztec Foundation can be contacted at hello@aztec.foundation or +41 41 710 16 70. For more information about the Aztec Foundation, visit https://aztec.foundation.
Every time you swap tokens on Uniswap, deposit into a yield vault, or vote in a DAO, you're broadcasting your moves to the world. Anyone can see what you own, where you trade, how much you invest, and when you move your money.
Tracking and analysis tools like Chainalysis and TRM are already extremely advanced, and will only grow stronger with advances in AI in the coming years. The implications of this are that the ‘pseudo-anonymous’ wallets on Ethereum are quickly becoming linked to real-world identities. This is concerning for protecting your personal privacy, but it’s also a major blocker in bringing institutions on-chain with full compliance for their users.
Until now, your only option was to abandon your favorite apps and move to specialized privacy-focused apps or chains with varying degrees of privacy. You'd lose access to the DeFi ecosystem as you know it now, the liquidity you depend on, and the community you're part of.
What if you could keep using Uniswap, Aave, Yearn, and every other app you love, but with your identity staying private? No switching chains. Just an incognito mode for your existing on-chain life?
If you’ve been following Aztec for a while, you would be right to think about Aztec Connect here, which was hugely popular with $17M TVL and over 100,000 active wallets, but was sunset in 2024 to focus on bringing a general-purpose privacy network to life.
Read on to learn how you’ll be able to import privacy to any L2, using one of the many privacy-focused bridges that are already built.
Aztec is a fully decentralized, privacy-preserving L2 on Ethereum. You can think of Aztec as a private world computer with full end-to-end programmable privacy. A private world computer extends Ethereum to add optional privacy at every level, from identity and transactions to the smart contracts themselves.
On Aztec, every wallet is a smart contract that gives users complete control over which aspects they want to make public or keep private.
Aztec is currently in Testnet, but will have multiple privacy-preserving bridges live for its mainnet launch, unlocking a myriad of privacy preserving features.
Now, several bridges, including Wormhole, TRAIN, and Substance, are connecting Aztec to other chains, adding a privacy layer to the L2s you already use. Think of it as a secure tunnel between you and any DeFi app on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, or other major chains.
Here's what changes: You can now use any DeFi protocol without revealing your identity. Furthermore, you can also unlock brand new features that take advantage of Aztec’s private smart contracts, like private DAO voting or private compliance checks.
Here's what you can do:
The apps stay where they are. Your liquidity stays where it is. Your community stays where it is. You just get a privacy upgrade.
Let's follow Alice through a real example.
Alice wants to invest $1,000 USDC into a yield vault on Arbitrum without revealing her identity.
Alice moves her funds into Aztec's privacy layer. This could be done in one click directly in the app that she’s already using if the app has integrated one of the bridges. Think of this like dropping a sealed envelope into a secure mailbox. The funds enter a private space where transactions can't be tracked back to her wallet.
Aztec routes Alice's funds to the Yearn vault on Arbitrum. The vault sees a deposit and issues yield-earning tokens. But there's no way to trace those tokens back to Alice's original wallet. Others can see someone made a deposit, but they have no idea who.
The yield tokens arrive in Alice's private Aztec wallet. She can hold them, trade them privately, or eventually withdraw them, without anyone connecting the dots.
Alice is earning yield on Arbitrum using the exact same vault as everyone else. But while other users broadcast their entire investment strategy, Alice's moves remain private.
The difference looks like this:
Without privacy: "Wallet 0x742d...89ab deposited $5,000 into Yearn vault at 2:47 PM"
With Aztec privacy: "Someone deposited funds into Yearn vault" (but who? from where? how much? unknowable).
In the future, we expect apps to directly integrate Aztec, making this experience seamless for you as a user.
While Aztec is still in Testnet, multiple teams are already building bridges right now in preparation for the mainnet launch.
Projects like Substance Labs, Train, and Wormhole are creating connections between Aztec and major chains like Optimism, Unichain, Solana, and Aptos. This means you'll soon have private access to DeFi across nearly every major ecosystem.
Aztec has also launched a dedicated cross-chain catalyst program to support developers with grants to build additional bridges and apps.
L2s have sometimes received criticism for fragmenting liquidity across chains. Aztec is taking a different approach. Instead, Aztec is bringing privacy to the liquidity that already exists. Your funds stay on Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, wherever the deepest pools and best apps already live. Aztec doesn't compete for liquidity, it adds privacy to existing liquidity.
You can access Uniswap's billions in trading volume. You can tap into Aave's massive lending pools. You can deposit into Yearn's established vaults, all without moving liquidity away from where it's most useful.
We’re rolling out a new approach to how we think about L2s on Ethereum. Rather than forcing users to choose between privacy and access to the best DeFi applications, we’re making privacy a feature you can add to any protocol you're already using. As more bridges go live and applications integrate Aztec directly, using DeFi privately will become as simple as clicking a button—no technical knowledge required, no compromise on the apps and liquidity you depend on.
While Aztec is currently in testnet, the infrastructure is rapidly taking shape. With multiple bridge providers building connections to major chains and a dedicated catalyst program supporting developers, the path to mainnet is clear. Soon, you'll be able to protect your privacy while still participating fully in the Ethereum ecosystem.
If you’re a developer and want a full technical breakdown, check out this post. To stay up to date with the latest updates for network operators, join the Aztec Discord and follow Aztec on X.
OTC trading is fundamental to how crypto markets function. It enables better price negotiations than what you'll find on public order books and facilitates trading of illiquid assets that barely exist on exchanges. Without OTC markets, institutional crypto trading would be nearly impossible. But here's the massive problem: every single OTC transaction leaves a permanent, public trace.
Let's say you're a fund manager who needs to sell 1,000 BTC for USDC on Base. In a traditional OTC trade, your Bitcoin leaves your wallet and becomes visible to everyone on Bitcoin's blockchain. Through cross-chain settlement, USDC then arrives in your Base wallet, which is also visible to everyone on Base's blockchain.
At this point, block explorers and analytics firms can connect these transactions through pattern analysis. As a result, your trading patterns, position sizes, and timing become public data, exposing your entire strategy.
This isn't just about privacy; transparent OTC creates serious operational and strategic risks. These same concerns have moved a significant portion of traditional markets to private off-exchange trades.
In TradFi, institutions don't execute large trades on public order books for many reasons. In fact, ~13% of all stocks in the US are now traded in dark pools, and more than 50% of trades are now off-exchange.
They use private networks, dark pools, and OTC desks specifically because:
While OTC trading is already a major part of the crypto industry, without privacy, true institutional participation will never be practical.
Now, Aztec is making this possible.
We built an open-source private OTC trading system using Aztec Network's programmable privacy features. Because Aztec allows users to have private, programmable, and composable private state, users aren’t limited to only owning and transferring digital assets privately, but also programming and composing them via smart contracts.
If you’re new to Aztec, you can think of the network as a private world computer, with full end-to-end programmable privacy. A private world computer extends Ethereum to add optional privacy at every level, from identity and transactions to the smart contracts themselves.
To build a private OTC desk, we leveraged all these tools provided by Aztec to implement a working proof of concept. Our private OTC desk is non-custodial and leverages private smart contracts and client-side proving to allow for complete privacy of the seller and buyer of the OTC.
How It Actually Works
For Sellers:
For Buyers:
The Magic: Partial Notes are the technical breakthrough that make collaborative, asynchronous private transactions possible. Sellers create incomplete payment commitments that buyers can finish without revealing the seller's identity. It's like leaving a blank check that only the right person can cash, but neither party knows who the other is.
Privacy guarantees include:
Private Contract Deployment: Unlike public decentralized exchanges where smart contracts are visible on the blockchain, the escrow contracts in this system are deployed privately, meaning that only the participants involved in the transaction know these contracts exist.
Partial Note Mechanism: This system uses cryptographic primitives that enable incomplete commitments to be finalized or completed by third parties, all while preventing those third parties from revealing or accessing any pre-existing information that was part of the original commitment.
Privacy-Preserving Discovery: The orderflow service maintains knowledge of aggregate trading volumes and overall market activity, but it cannot see the details of individual traders, including their specific trade parameters or personal identities.
Atomic Execution: The smart contract logic is designed to ensure that both sides of a trade occur simultaneously in a single atomic operation, meaning that if any part of the transaction fails, the entire transaction is rolled back and neither party's assets are transferred.
Our prototype for this is open-sourced here, and you can read about the proof of concept directly from the developer here.
We're inviting teams to explore, fork, and commercialize this idea. The infrastructure for private institutional trading needs to exist, and Aztec makes it possible today. Whether you're building a private DEX, upgrading your OTC desk, or exploring new DeFi primitives, this codebase is your starting point.
The traditional finance world conducts trillions in private OTC trades. It's time to bring that scale to crypto, privately.
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