The Next Renaissance: Privacy, Identity, and the Future of Crypto Growth

Transcript

welcoming as the co-founder and CEO of Aztec Labs. Everyone, please give a round of applause for Zach Williamson. Hello, good afternoon everybody. Uh my name is Zachary Williamson. I am CEO and co-founder of Aztec Lab. We are a privacy first uh programmable layer for Ethereal. Effectively, we've been working for 8 years now with a singular machine of recreating uh the smart contact either but one where you have private information on chain uh and you

can proact private data. And I'm here to talk about uh why privacy matters, why this technology matters, what's the future, the imminent future of blockchain is going to look like and how embracing privacy technology is going to lead to an explosion of liquidity on chain. So I want to present a new framework, a new canop for why 3 is going to become so valuable in the future because it's a very simple question. When you have private information on chain uh where that data is encrypted, your ledger is encrypted and every individual's transactions are effectively using zero

knowledge pree to viculate that encrypted data. You get the best or worlds. You get these strong guarantees of decentralization but you also don't have this course transparency where everything is visible on chain and if you have these properties what that enables is identity instead of just being a string of letters and carried chain you can now be an individual I can be I can prove on a network by Gastec that my name is Zarya I'm 37 years old I live in the United Kingdom and I'm proving this to make smart confidence And with identity, you can now immediately just open assets on chains.

Your assets to be good assets to uh be purely. They can be representations of real world assets where have non-custodial wallets on chain that could go over the trade and transact assets because uh chain protocols smart contracts can form the required pie chips regulatory chairs to understand that yes you are allowed pay this asset you're allowed tolling and what this does is it unlocks effectively defy but for assets sourced to the reund and going to explain is an a minute why I think this is going to revolution.

But before I do is to quickly segue into what the assaying network is. So it's fully fishless so decentralized as a layer to one of the it functions like a blockchain network using ethereion of consensus and kaspar but their premise. This is why we are pulling as the first feature deep blockchain in mobile because with ASC you can really look what happens in a smart context what happens in the real world in web two. No longer are you limited by fairly betted assess and you can have meaningful information on chain. Now we've been building the score 8 years about six to eight counters. Uh our test net's live fully decentralized. Um

people are building out some accurately as I speak and we are aiming to launch the full network early next year. I want to pose a question to you. Has blockchain met its original ambitions maserations of its people like Satoshi Nakapa. So people like the tallest and I would argue that whilst blockchain is extraordinarily valuable whilst it's very useful whilst it's a powerful technology it is nevertheless failed in the aspiration of his inventions.

Bitcoin was not designed to be digital gold. It was designed to be a payment vehicle, a payments mechanism where a digital currency could compete could test with fiats issued by sovereign states. Ethereal was designed to enable centralized banks was designed to disable financial products of services that we take broadly in the real world uh but in a much more permissionless safari. And again, we've largely seen that fail. We don't have decentralized banks. We do have stable coin and we do have stable coin payment which is important but it's not the full picture.

And my first question to you why is this the case? Why is blockchain fails to break out of it free bubble? It's a car global payment infrastructure, global financial infrastructure that everybody uses. And I would argue that the key reason is a lack of privacy. Everything that happens on blockchains like Bitcoin, it's fully public. This means you can't put your real world identity on on that network. Um, and without that smart contracts, block your protocols. They can't perform the logical checks and guarantees uh that they need. It's Herman if you are allowed to hold or trade an assets that is sourced from the real world that that exists within the aal regency jurisdiction on the planet.

But with privacy technology, you can do that. And that's what makes me excited. And I'm going to explain why this is valuable because this is not just a synthetically interesting topic. This is not just an academically educated comic. And I'll say why where does all the value of blockchain come from. All the money that is that is used in this industry that is used to create these incredible conferences like tokenis 49. It only comes two sources. There's dollarbacked stable coins and there's the native value of economic consensus on a blockchain. The consensus sheets how much people willing to pay Bitcoin or Ethereum or Salana gets a crustless record of events.

To give an example of why this case, imagine if the price of Ethereum went to zero tomorrow. We all know the price the value on every single token on Ethereum would also go to zero with the exception of dollar back symb. I would pause this to you. This liquidity universe of these resources it's tiny relative to existing capital markets. The aum of blackrop for example is substantially higher than the football value on the net side. And that's one company without being able to reaches the real world without being able to tap real world assets on chain and bit liquid to

use them as a source of liquidity or defy and other financial cards and services. The gross seeding for crypto is basically can because we only have this needs to change and privacy is doing will change. So this is where I said that you cannot exist with identity. You have non-custodial accounts where I can pick who I am or it could be an entity just press it could be an organization. It could be a Dell but where you have checks and balances and some kind of god conditions that give smart contract culability who you are. For example, I can through uh I possess a Firebase

account and I've got them through Coinbase KYC or I can use something like CK passports uh to create a uh zero proof of my passports app to prove I'm the UK citiz as a flight and identity. Well, it enables ownership now. I want to be able to own something is the real world based uh like where everything consent happens on chain the issuance the trade the settlement this is this is really an asset DNA because what we started out doing in 2017 was not u privacy tech uh me and my my co-founder we were trying to make a build a traditional financial

polit change serving existing capital markets serving bid market debt But we needed privacy to do that and now we're doing it. Uh we made privacy and now companies web free companies are using the tech that we built for that original produce case that we were trying to do in 2017. We have we have companies trying building bit debt products using our technology and finally he gets to uh self- sovereign longer stable wallets holding real world assets. For this to happen, privacy must become a pool add of block test. It can't be an asset specific thing. We just going to be one of the first.

Once you have real world assets on them protocols, that's the important phase. Right now we do have real world assets to chain but they are too abstract to hold these assets. you to go to third party information workers, information custodian because you can't just hold a bond or a mortgage uh or a syndicated loan on chain. Um what's happening is that somebody else is owning it and then it's giving you some digital proxy because that proxy is not tradable. You can't put it into a into a new centralized exchange because not everybody can hold that asset. But if you could perform conformance checks, regulatory checks within a smart contract framework, then you create an

equivalent unis swap or real world assets uh and associated e5 primitive and then that unlocks these assets as a source of liquidity and that turns the the the the liquidity amount of liquidity available you know it's not being measured in a million and it's starting measured in a trillions. So how are we going to do this? out against all blockchain database make it global financial infrastructure. The first thing we need to do is we need to interface with web two. We need to be able to guess information from web two into smart contact web 3 across the scene using technologies like CKTLS to get information from web servers into

smart contracts. Uh using technologies like email to get information emails to spark context for example. Um, I can use the technology that we're building to prove that I have an email from his majesty's revenue and collection services uh conflating about my uh leak tax filing which will booze UK taxpayer I mean as far issue a credential based off of this proof saying yes okay this person UK taxpayer and then you can use that credential in other products and services still contain in a composable manner creating this um a form of holistic identity where it's central identity being defined by one centralized source. It's being it's being drawn from a large

number of dispersal where companies build products on aspect where they create identity that they from their specific products but in doing so they issue a digital credential that can be used by other products and services which can then usually use to create meta credentials effectively allowing an understanding of who you are to be sourced from a very large cast of actors which I think is a lot more secure and scapable more scalable than the existing system where if I want to KYC myself to do something in the in the real world see some financial transaction you know I've got to go do some process that and then if I want to do another if I need to go through some other regulated transaction I actually that KYC process

all over again because these companies don't share data they don't trusty cover with programmable privacy with composable smart contract page that all uh and and a genuinely uh system for identities And then the final technique is to uh establish digital solvers. Once you have these systems criticals existing chain can prove you can can create precedent that owning a digital asset uh represents a clay to prophecy in the real world and once has established the world of chain.

The degrees of blockchain are Azure's programming language blob that be built uh it's very high level that scraps away all the typography any devon block go and create private programs and then we have the asset network the which is a effectively execution environments or no where we have a decrypted state lender decrypted blockchain which understands privacy and understands private transaction when you combine with go means you can have I call a smart contract that is private that calls another private smart contract contract somebody else wrote that was not a pilot smart contract that somebody else wrote effectively enabling the the uh the uh the full smart appliers of blockchain and then finally is 3D cryptography tied

all together which is something that we excel at uh uh our tech cryptography we invented power a lot of blockchain protocols today what I'm talking about is not science tech it's science fact the Aztec technology stack is the use in the virtual world day. You could you could download the app from the app store or ZK parcel that uses our tech which allows you to purposely get free um of of your of your citizenship of your aid your name without reading any any additional information. We have bank grade private security segments. We have 100 media. This is just the start. This is the this is the start of the scone that is to come where we're going to be creating the real decentralized banking

performing the real original vision of blockchain all those years ago finally in 2026 creating for the first time the world's first feature blockchain. Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much black Williamson. Ladies and gentlemen,