How to position yourself in Aztec, the breakthrough Ethereum privacy L2?

Author: KarenZ, Foresight News

In the development of blockchain technology, the tension between privacy protection and transparency has always been a focal point for the industry. Ethereum has established a foundation of trust through strong decentralization and verifiability, yet its fully public transaction data mechanism exposes user privacy to pervasive surveillance.

Against this backdrop, the emergence of the Aztec privacy network brings new possibilities for resolving this conflict. On May 1, 2025, Aztec officially launched its public testnet and opened access to developers for the first time, enabling them to build applications with full privacy protection within the Ethereum ecosystem.

As a privacy-focused Layer 2 solution in the Ethereum ecosystem, Aztec leverages zero-knowledge proof technology to provide programmable privacy protection and low-cost transaction processing for users and DApps. This article will introduce the project from several dimensions: overview, core team and funding history, project development timeline, and interaction guide.

What is Aztec's background?

Aztec is developed by Aztec Labs, founded in 2017. Aztec Labs operates fully remotely, with 67 team members currently listed on its official website. Key leadership includes:

• Co-founder and CEO Zac Williamson: Co-inventor of the PLONK zero-knowledge proof system, holds a PhD in Particle Physics from Oxford University.

• Co-founder and President Joe Andrews: Member of EF9 Cohort, holds a bachelor’s degree in Materials Science from Imperial College London, formerly CTO at Silicon Valley food tech company Radish.

• Co-founder Tom Walton Pocock: Formerly served as Aztec CEO, but is no longer listed on Aztec’s official team page.

• CTO Charlie Lye: Holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University, with 20 years of experience. Previously Chief Engineer at Triptease, and C++ Engineer at Bloomberg and BetFair.

• COO Lisa Cuesta Bunin: MBA from Harvard University, BS from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Formerly led NextGen Venture Partners, which was acquired by Brown Advisory.

• CMO Claire Kart: Previously worked at RISC Zero, Mina Foundation (founder), O(1) Labs, Ripple, SoFi, among others.

• CFO Scott Siversen: Former CFO of ShapeShift.

In terms of funding, Aztec has attracted significant investment, raising over $119 million to date.

In November 2018, Aztec completed a $2.1 million seed round led by Consensys Labs.

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

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

What is Aztec?

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

How does Aztec enhance privacy? Aztec encodes additional checks within the zk-SNARK circuits of its zk-Rollup, introducing the concepts of private state and private functions to fundamentally secure the privacy of every transaction.

Specifically, Aztec adopts a model where private and public functions work together. Private functions execute locally on the user's device, preserving privacy and generating proofs; public functions are executed by sequencers on Aztec’s own virtual machine (AVM), operating on public state visible to all. A single transaction may include both private and public function calls, strictly following the order of executing private functions locally first, then public functions on the AVM.

Notably, because Aztec’s privacy mechanism heavily relies on client-side proof generation and encrypted data, and due to incompatibility with the EVM architecture, it is not EVM-compatible. Instead, Aztec has created its own virtual machine—the AVM (Aztec Virtual Machine). AVM contracts are written in Noir (a language designed specifically for zero-knowledge applications and privacy contracts), compiled into ZK circuits, with each function corresponding to a ZK SNARK verification key.

In terms of state model, Aztec uses a hybrid model combining private and public states. Public state is stored and updated by sequencers, who perform state transitions, generate proofs of correct execution (or delegate proof generation to a network of provers), and publish relevant data to Ethereum.

Private state is stored in the form of UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Outputs, referred to by Aztec as Notes), decryptable only by their owners. The hashes of Notes are stored in a Merkle tree (note hash tree). When you "spend" a note, Aztec marks the original note's commitment as "nullified" and creates a new note assigned to a new owner, achieving an effect similar to cash change. External observers cannot trace fund flows.

According to Aztec, Notes are analogous to cash, though slightly different. In real life, when spending $3.50, you hand a $5 bill to the cashier, who keeps $3.50 and returns $1.50 in change. On Aztec using private notes, when spending a $5 note, you nullify it and create a $1.50 note (owned by yourself) and a $3.50 note (owned by the recipient). Only you and the recipient know about the $3.50 transaction—you split the $5 bill without anyone else knowing.

Aztec Development Timeline and Milestones

Aztec Labs initially aimed to build a blockchain-based lending platform called CreditMint. However, during development, the team realized that public blockchains lacking privacy could not gain broad user trust. This insight led Aztec to pivot decisively toward privacy technology development.

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

In 2021 and 2022, Aztec launched zk.money and Aztec Connect (Aztec Connect, a privacy-preserving DeFi solution for Ethereum).

At the end of 2022, Aztec released Noir—an open-source zero-knowledge programming language based on Rust—simplifying the development of privacy smart contracts and lowering the barrier to entry for developers.

In 2023, Aztec strategically discontinued zk.money and Aztec Connect, shifting focus entirely to becoming a fully decentralized ZK Rollup, concentrating on Noir and next-generation cryptographic blockchain development.

In February 2025, Aztec launched the Aztec Foundation, which will conduct foundational research in the field of liberating cryptography, support developers building innovative applications, protect user privacy, ensure compliance, and maintain Noir as the universal language for zero-knowledge proofs.

On May 1, 2025, Aztec launched the Aztec Public Testnet, aiming to rigorously test decentralization mechanisms related to sequencing, proving, and governance ahead of mainnet launch.

Aztec Public Testnet

Aztec aims to become a fully decentralized, permissionless, and privacy-focused Layer 2 network on Ethereum. The Aztec Public Testnet serves as a platform for developers, node operators, and regular users to explore privacy-centric blockchains, focusing on testing three core aspects of decentralization: decentralized sequencing, decentralized proving, and decentralized governance.

For decentralized sequencing, anyone can run a sequencer node to participate in transaction ordering, block proposal, and validation of blocks generated by other sequencers. The sequencing network adopts a PoS mechanism similar to Ethereum, but block validation is performed by a randomly selected set of 48 sequencers, requiring two-thirds majority approval to confirm a block—enabling fast pre-confirmation while relying on Ethereum for final settlement security.

For decentralized proving, provers generate cryptographic proofs to verify the correctness of public transactions, ultimately forming a Rollup proof submitted to Ethereum. The proving client developed by Aztec Labs consists of three components: Prover nodes identify unproven epochs (sets of 32 blocks) and create individual proof tasks; Proving brokers add these proof requests to a queue and assign them to idle prover agents; Prover agents compute the actual proofs. Once the final proof is computed, the prover node submits it to L1 for verification. The Aztec network distributes proving rewards to all users who submit proofs on time, thereby mitigating centralization risks posed by entities with large computational resources.

How to Participate?

1. For developers: Visit the developer portal (https://aztec.network/developers) to customize and deploy contracts using both public and private components.

2. For node operators:

Sequencer nodes can run on standard consumer-grade hardware. (Click here for setup guide.)

Prover nodes require higher computational power to participate in generating zero-knowledge proofs. Click here for setup guide. (According to Aztec, running a prover node demands more hardware resources than a sequencer node—approximately 40 machines, each expected to have 16 cores and 128GB of RAM.)

It should be emphasized that due to potentially high operational costs—and because testnet and mainnet costs are equivalent—Aztec’s public testnet limits transaction throughput to 0.2 transactions per second (TPS).

That said, Aztec emphasizes, “No airdrops, no marketing gimmicks. We just want to build a community of highly skilled operators.” However, Aztec notes that node operators will receive Discord role badges.

3. For regular users:

Interact with the Aztec ecosystem:

1. Create a Obsidion or Azguard wallet;

2. Bridge via Human Tech: Transfer testnet tokens from Ethereum;

3. Swap on NEMI (currently requires access code);

4. Interact with the Raven House NFT marketplace.