December Newsletter – AZTEC Protocol
It’s now been a month since we released the AZTEC PoC implementation. This concluded months of cryptography, soundness proofs, academic review and coding.
We’ve reached base camp, and we want to thank everyone who engaged with the paper or the code to make this possible — in particular to Professor Jens Groth whose deep expertise in the field was invaluable in crafting the paper into its final, digestible form.
We also want to thank the many hundreds of you who have reached out to us — Dapp builders, contributors, investors. The response has been overwhelming and we’re thrilled to be bringing you privacy on Ethereum mainnet in 2019. We will be creating a community Rocket Chat in January. If you want to join, add your email here.
The past few weeks we’ve worked hard to speak to as many of you as possible, to make sure we’re building the right things in the right order, and we’re very grateful to you all for your invaluable feedback. It’s been a great way to close off the year, and set the agenda for the next.
Our journey since 2017 taken us from cafe-dwelling, to Entrepreneur First’s biscuit factory in South London, to Balderton’s Launch programme, and backing by ConsenSys, Samos Investments, Jeff Tarrant and Mov37, Charlie Songhurst, and a roster of angel investors too, including our four original pre-seed investors.
Last week, we released the code which allows anyone to interact with our deployed smart contracts. We stress that the AZTEC code is pre-audit, and this should be considered a PoC. We encourage you not to interact with the mainnet smart contract with any tokens you’re not prepared to potentially lose.
We have released the documentation and code for the client side api and the updated smart contracts for you to browse and experiment with, and also, we have a bug bounty to reward anyone who finds glitches in the code.
Go to the proof generation API
Before AZTEC is officially ready for production, we have key milestones to reach.
The first one is the AZTEC token standard (i.e. a zero knowledge ERC20). We will be releasing our draft token standard in the coming week.
AZTEC will be working with the major utility protocols on Ethereum to create interoperable privacy across dapps on mainnet. We’ll announce these partnerships in the new year.
Next, and arguably one of the most important pieces to build for AZTEC to reach its full potential, is what we call the Crypto Engine. This is an extension of AZTEC which allows for smart contracts to interact with each other in zero knowledge.
The mathematics behind AZTEC allow for everything from zero knowledge cash distributions (e.g. dividends on stocks, interest on loans, payouts on royalties) to zero knowledge voting, implemented through AZTEC’s Crypto Engine. We will be releasing the spec and PoC for the engine in the second half of February. This will allow us to get feedback from the community, and will give you all the chance to understand how to build AZTEC into your architectures.
To take AZTEC and the Crypto Engine to production, we will run our ceremony in collaboration with the community. We will be spending a lot of the next few months building a MPC system, designed to allow as many people as possible to participate. This is a complex piece of engineering, and we will be releasing code for audit along the way. We expect to run the setup from April at the very earliest.
We’ve already got some exciting new joiners for 2019, and will be further growing out the AZTEC team in the coming months. If you’re interested, do reach out to hello@aztecprotocol.com.
January Newsletter
Published at Wed, 28 Aug 2019 13:36:46 +0000
Bitcoin Pic Of The Moment
By CashlessWay – Global Hub for ePayment Culture on 2014-06-28 09:38:54
