Zachary Williamson
Zachary Williamson is the CEO and co-founder of Aztec Network, a privacy first Ethereum layer 2 that launched its Ignition Chain and a community led $61 million AZTEC token sale in late 2025 after an eight year build. A physicist by training, he holds a PhD in particle physics from Oxford and worked at CERN and on Japan's T2K experiment before turning to cryptography. He is best known as a co-inventor of PLONK, the universal zero knowledge proving system that became a foundational standard far beyond Aztec itself, and he has led the project's technical vision from its 2017 founding through zk.money, Aztec Connect, and the Noir programming language.
50 talks by Zachary Williamson
- Zac Williamson & Joe Andrews: Aztec - Privacy-preserving hybrid ZK rollup #499
- zkStudyClub - Goblin PLonK (Zac Williamson, Aztec Protocol)
- Episode 273 - History of Plonk, Noir, and the building of Aztec 3
- Data Privacy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- L2’s Centralized or Censorship Resistant - Zachary Williamson
- Modern Encryption in Decentralized Networks Anika Raghuvanshi mod; Chris Casssano Lit Protocol; Mich
- Modern Encryption in Decentralized Networks Anika Raghuvanshi mod; Chris Casssano Lit Protocol; Mich
- A Rollup Vision for Ethereum: Zk vs Optimistic - Panel
- ZK HACK - Introduction to Aztec Connect
- How to Leverage Scalability and Privacy on Mainnet
- Joe Andrews & Zac Williamson: Aztec Protocol – Bringing Scalable Privacy to DeFi #405
- zkSessions: Zac Williamson — Programmable Privacy with Noir
- Zk-zk-Rollup & zk.money with Zac and Joe from Aztec
- Aztec - Joe Andrews (CPO) and Zac Williamson (CTO) | Meet the Nation
- zkSessions: DeFi + Privacy Panel with Tarun, Zac and Stani
- zkSessions: DeFi & Privacy - Building privacy-preserving DeFi
- zkSummit: plookup: Speeding up the PLONK prover - Zac Williamson & Ariel Gabizon
- Tom Pocock & Zac Williamson: AZTEC Protocol – Bringing Zero-Knowledge Transactions to Ethereum #335
- ZKpodcast: Dive into Plonk
- zkSummit - Into the deep end: making sense of PLONK - Zac Williamson (CTO, Aztec Protocol)
- Privacy by design in a world with universal SNARKs
- ZK Study Club - Plonk with Zac Williamson
- All Core Devs - Execution #62
- ZKPodcast: Exploring Aztec with Zac Williamson