What Aztec Alpha Actually Means for Builders

Transcript

[music] But we have a stacked agenda, so it's going to be pretty pretty good. And so first of all, we're going to be going through what Alpha is with the co-founder, Zach. Then we're going to be going through what you can build with the co-founder Joe. And we've got David as well to be doing the interview. And then finally, we're going to be going through how you can get started building with myself and also Rob. So get excited. I feel like I've said excited like 10 times now. Grab yourself a a snack, a drink, and let's just settle in

and get started. So, like I said, first of all, we've got Zach, who's going to be going through what Alpha is. So, Zach, I hear you've got a very special announcement. >> Hello. >> Please introduce yourself. >> Yeah, happy to. Um, is this the camera? >> This is the camera. >> Yeah. Yeah. Hello. Um, brilliant. >> And then we've got a wide angle, I think. >> All right, GM. Everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. Um, thank you for the introduction, Kar. This is also Yeah. Um, bit new for me. Um, is it new for me? I'm just blah whatever. I'm sleep tired >> in a studio like this.

>> In a studio. Yes. [laughter] The production values are much better than we're normally used to. Um so Aztec Alpha. Yes. Um we have an announcement to make which is that alpha is live. >> Um so what like what what do we mean by alpha? Right. Um so >> in the simplest terms, can you explain to me just like in a nutshell what is alpha? >> Yeah, it's real. That's what it is. Um it's so the the the proper network that fully functions as decentralized sequences, provers, transactions, etc. is all now deployed. Our roll-ups are on Ethereum mainet. You can send transactions to them. You can send transactions to the ASICH network that interact with Ethereum. So it is it is it is um effectively a mainet. Um but we are calling it alpha because it still has uh you know we are Joe will go into

this in more detail I imagine. Um but um uh uh we're you know there's there's still a few things that we're going to have to iron out. a few security issues we need to we need to validate but um the full the core functionality is not there and people can build and they can deploy and they can use it the way we always intended um after so many years. >> Yeah. Which is so exciting. It's like early Ethereum, right? Like we're right at the start. Everything is exciting. Everything's iterating and going so far. So it's just a really exciting time to get involved I guess for developers and for users. >> Um alpha is feature complete. Mh.

>> So can you tell us a little bit about what that means and also about what the journey from just wanting to bring assets on chain which is I think where you started right and then how we got to here and just like a little bit about that. >> Yeah. So so um like uh so the first question again >> just about being feature complete. What does that mean? >> What does that mean? Well it means that um uh so you now have the full execution environment of Aztec. You can write a smart contract uh using our programming language no uh which has you know like an Ethereum smart contract. It has storage you know it has functions and your functions can call smart contracts and other fun other functions and you can emit events and you can connect all of it to to all of this with a with an

application and you can um use Aztec as a distributed ledger but it's private. So you have um hidden information, encrypted information that your smart contract can analyze, things like private notes, encrypted balances, um hidden user identities. So you know even for like a take a basic token example for Aztec, if I send a token transfer on Aztec, uh you don't know if you're an observer looking at the network traffic, you don't know who I am. You don't know what smart contract I'm interacting with and you don't know what like data I've modified or changed. Yes, I performed a token transfer um because uh I have a zero but the transaction contains a zero knowledge proof that validates the correctness of of the of the logic of

the smart contracts that I have called. Um and obviously this is all extracted away from the user and the developer. You write a smart contract. It has it has you know it has storage and you have functions and then you just call the um call call the functions um on your on your on your client um and and everything just works and it's all feels and looks very automatic. >> I want to be um just really aware of the fact that some of the people tuning in might not actually know really what Aztec is. So if we just zoom out for a second are you able to just in maybe like one or two sentences maybe two say what actually is Aztec and why you think it's really useful? Yeah. So, it's a private um it's a private distributed ledger. Uh I don't know how far back we

want to go like are we talking blockchain native people or >> we we can talk about let's say Ethereum. >> Okay. I'll take an Ethereum smart contract. >> Um but allow for but make uh um make it so that information in that smart contract can be encrypt and hidden so that you don't know um so that you you don't know whether a transaction is modifying that information. Mhm. >> However, the smart contract itself can still um ex uh process logic on that information. So, you can do things like have a token, but you can hide the balance from uh from the world or you can uh you can hide user identities from the world. Uh and so what this enables really is it allows for blockchains to uh accumulate and accept sensitive data

about ourselves, institutions, companies, events happening in the real world. Allows allows you to put that data on smart contracts in encrypted form and have distributed like smart contracts um programs operate on that information. Uh and this explodes the universe of what you can build with a blockchain. For example, you know, if you want to do anything kind of like um real world asset stuff, you know, the smart contract needs to understand who you are as a user because they need to understand whether you can hold that asset, right? Because you have to all these weird conditions that you that that have to be satisfied in the real world and and um right now a smart contract on Ethereum can't do that, >> but it can Aztec. Um you can just do basic things like hide um like if you if you're if you're a whale and you're

trading and you want to you don't want people to see your positions well yeah you can do that on Aztec. Um you can even now use Aztec to to hide hide hide your identity on other networks other L1 other L2s by using Aztec as a proxy so that um effectively the Aztec network is acting on your behalf and people don't see your true identity. So have being able to have privacy in the Ethereum ecosystem by having by having Aztec. >> We are obviously at the this alpha stage which you were describing a second ago. Let's just go into a little bit more about alpha. So this was passed by governance, right? Do we want to talk a little bit about what that means that it was passed by governance and why this was so important to us about like decentralization and why that is the the

sort of cornerstone of Aztec is we really care about decentralization. Um, >> totally, totally. So, most networks that launch these days are centralized in some way, right? You either have a single entity that's accepting and processing transactions or you have an entity that can like pause the network or block the network or or censor people. And we've always felt this is um really just not um this this kills adoption. uh because you know if you're building a product or a service uh and you're deploying to a blockchain network, you need to have very strong confidence that this network is is completely neutral, it's reliable, it's not going to rug pull you or change its parameters to to to affect you or undermine you. And so you like like Ethereum, you need decentralized governance. And so before uh our alpha

upgrade um we did have a version of Asteric on Ethereum that was processing blocks, but the uh the the gas limit was zero. Basically, there were no transactions. And so we submitted a governance proposal saying hey listen we want to increase this gas limit now because because because the network is functional and our sequence has voted on whether to accept it or to to refuse it. Um and uh uh so they could have refused. Um and like this is this like who submits proposals who votes on them. This is not something we control. Anybody could submit a proposal. Somebody could submit a proposal saying hey let's just shut this all down or uh you know like actually let's just like ignore Aztec and bridge everything to to another network. Let's hopefully uh I'm not I'm not seeding any ideas to anybody, but um uh yeah, basically we

don't control this network. And I mean that in reality as in not not some theater where like we say, "Oh, we don't control it. It's token voting, but we hold all the tokens." It's like, "No, the foundation is not not like not using it treasury to vote for any of of these things." It's purely run by our sequences. Uh so yeah it's like it's it's it's proper decentralization >> which is really cool because without decentralization you can't really have privacy can you like >> if there's a point of failure right like there's the let's say the the sequencers were able to see the private private data if there's one sequencer who's yesing and knowing everything then then that's not really privacy is it because we're revealing it to that one centralized sequencer.

>> Exactly. Yeah. like to to give it an analog an analog of the internet. Imagine if all the internet traffic went through one company. Let's call it Mega Corp. Mega Corp processes all the internet traffic. Well, then you know some some men in black suits would turn out to Mega Corp and go, "Hello, we want to see everything that's happening. Please and thank you." And uh and like you're now liable for everything that's happening. It's not it's not a it's not a network at that point. It's it's it's a it's a product of a company. Uh, and so for our for Aztec to to to survive, to thrive, it it needs to be not not just some like, you know, expression of some corporate entity, it needs to be a proper distributed network like the internet, like HTTPS, uh, and and IPv6 and all of that. Um, and so that's

that's what we've built. >> Yeah. I mean, it's so cool that after, you know, so much hard work from the whole team and yourself that we've finally got to this place where we have alpha. And as I was saying earlier, one of the key things that I know that you were so passionate about is making sure that it was feature complete from day one. We have everything now. We're not saying I pinky promise later we're going to have private state or whatever. We're making sure that we have private data, private identity, and private compute. Uh I think it might make sense to just go through what that means, the the data, identity, and compute and why it was so important to have those three from day one.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I mean uh so so private data is basically the core of Aztec as in without it it's not it's just another blockchain you know um but that that's the unique difference you can you can hide information in your smart contract >> like a private balance or >> it just works >> um and that now then extends to identity because uh you know privacy is a very hot narrative in web 3 these days but uh I gave a talk the just just earlier at ECC and I asked the people attending you know how many people actually actively use private blockchain technologies and and basically like there was like three people who raised their hand. Um it's it's just a narrative uh because because I would argue that up until now uh like the technology like for consumer grade

applications doesn't yet exist. Um and one of the reasons is you know it yeah you have all these various random like hodgepodge solutions all over the web 3 space about doing like oh you can do private tokens under certain conditions but they don't they don't do private identity and this is kind of important because if suddenly everything about what you're doing is hidden you probably need to prove something about who you are um to the to the network that the smart contracts that are executing all of this um because uh you know it's um otherwise You're you're creating a situation where good honest actors are probably helping bad actors, malicious actors hide hide in their in the in the anonymity set. But more importantly, you

know, you just can't do important real world stuff. To give an example, >> um let's take you know how like web 3 accounts kind of suck. >> Uh you know, you're like, "Oh, on an Ethereum account, here's your private key, here's your seed phrase, blah blah blah." Um uh how about but like with AASC we have account obstruction by default and you can combine that with our privacy features to say let's you can make an account smart contract where what it does is it verifies your Google or signin flow. So I can say I'm zack atgmail.com. I don't I don't have zackgmail.com. I wish I did.

>> Yeah. Everyone's going to email you now. Doesn't exist. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, [laughter] if I had Zack at gmail.com, I could basically have a smart contract which verifies that the the sign-in flow. Um, and so I'm signing into my account with Google and that that's it. It's not it's not a proxy for a private key. That is the authorization. [clears throat] Um, and you know, maybe that's not suitable for all use cases because then Google kind of knows a little bit about they know you're you're logging in. Um, uh, but it's um, for hot wallets, you know, that that basically is perfect for consumer grade stuff. Uh >> yeah, the signing flow is intentionally open-ended to the developer. So if they want to implement biometrics or even the simple password, it doesn't have to be uh ECDSA key by default. It can be kind

of anything they want. >> It can be an X account. It could be if you want to be crazy, it could be a passport scanner. It could be you could you could have like a proven existence of an email if you really wanted to go down that road. Uh it really just explores the design space of what you can do in a smart contract. Yeah. >> Yeah. We're going to maybe my co-founder Joe might talk a bit about this, but we're with um with the something he's building. Um but I think it's going to it's going to define powerful new user experience patterns for for blockchain. >> Yeah. I mean, let's go into it a tiny bit now. I think it would be worth it.

I'd love to hear what you think about what alpha means for the future of the industry and why programmable privacy is so important for the for the blockchain industry. I think I think we should go into that a little Well, it's all about showing, not telling, isn't it? And I've been doing this for eight years now. And for eight years, I've been talking about how privacy is the missing link. How, you know, this blockchain world of synthetic assets and synthetic NFTTS um can't expand. So, I can't see anything with my glasses. [laughter] Take them off. Um, it can't expand into into more tangible and real world activities because of the lack of privacy. But you know, now you can actually build applications that do it

that walk the walk. Um that's what we're like that's what uh Joe is going to be doing at Aztec Labs. It's what um the foundation is assisting a load of our ecosystem partners with. It's >> you know um it's not just going to be me like us in podcast studios and and in conference centers talking about oh this is the things you can do. It was going to be like you can do it. I'm myself building building some applications on Aztec to kind of to to to demonstrate the network to provide some technology examples. Um and it's very it's just very it's very refreshing uh to if I want can give a a small anecdote here.

Please, please do. I love an idea. >> When I started, when I started in blockchain in 2017, I started writing smart contracts because I, you know, I um I was getting into this with my co-founders at the time building um like private um private credit markets. Um boring valuable stuff basically all the most all the most valuable stuff is pretty boring. Uh and so apart from Aztec um and and uh but basically Trafy on blockchain and I was writing a bunch of smart contracts to make this happen. Then obviously at some point I realized, oh wait, I need privacy. I can't I can't hand I can't like put multi-billion dollar portfolios on a transparent network. That's not going to fly. And so that ended us ended up upon us going on a minor detour over the last eight years

of um you know re I became a cryptographer. We researched and developed novel cryptographic primitives, published papers, turned papers into in from math into code and then built products around them and then built an entire network in a programming language etc etc. Now eight years on, I'm back to writing smart contracts finally. [laughter] >> Yay. >> But this time they're Aztec smart contracts and they have the private data that we always needed. Um and so it's yeah it's it's we're going to you know over the next few months we're going to be showing we're not going to be telling um you know with with with working examples and end to end demonstrations and applications and things that people can use and touch that um show like functionalities that just don't exist

right now on blockchain. >> Yeah. Actually let's stay there for a second going back in time with a little story time. I do want to talk as a kind of I I pride myself on being a bit of a nerd. Um as someone who because you have a physics background I know and I also have a background in physics less impressive than yours. I would love to hear >> we're both we're both physics refugees. >> We are we are indeed. And so I actually found out about Aztec through a podcast you did with Dagachi. So this is kind of like a nice full circle moment for my career. So, I would actually love to hear a bit about how you came from your physics background to working on Aztec and making cryptographic breakthroughs and all of the things that you did. I'd love to hear about those breakthroughs

and just how you got there. >> Right. Well, um, so as an ex-hysicist, you probably understand that, you know, when one when when you do a physics degree, you you kind of have this kind of life crisis at the end of it because you realize that you spent four three to four years of your life >> um basically like becoming good at something which is very weird and niche as in um yes, you know, if you unless you want to do hardcore physics research, um if you want to get a job in the real world, uh you know, you you can do engineering but not as good as a proper engineer. You can do computer programming but not as good as a proper computer scientist. You can do maths but not as good as a proper mathematician.

So you basically you have you have a lot of skills but you're not you're not an expert at any of them and you got to find a way forward. You got to find a path in life. And so um this led to me meandering around a bunch of random occupations until I fell into blockchain because just p through pure serendipity. My brother's best friend was like the guy called Tom PCO who wanted to do some Trafy thing. He was a trader. He was a guy an accountant and um uh he needed a technical co-founder and I'm like well I'm not doing I'm not doing anything interesting right now. I had some boring programming jobs. So I'm like yeah let's do this blockchain thing. Why not? Um but then we through the course of that we discovered oh we need privacy for this application um we're building and

because I was addicted to to to the idea of doing a startup you know like actually having some control over my face finally uh I I became obsessed with this. I'm like I have to solve this problem. Uh and because of my physics background I had enough of a mathematical understanding to sort of sort of understand cryptographic papers. >> Back in the day it was not like it is today. There's loads of easy learning resources if you want to learn about zero cryptography. No, no, no. In 2017, >> you had like there was like a cryptography stack overflow where you had cryptographers talking to each other. Wow. >> And you had academic papers and that was basically it. Um, and so I spent many many months basically just like pouring over these papers which I didn't really understand, but it would basically be like a treasure hunt. I would read a bit

of the paper and if I didn't understand what it was talking about, I'd look at the thing it was referencing >> and then I read that paper and if I and if I didn't understand what that was talking about, I would read its references and eventually you go back far enough that you have some that it starts getting more basic and you can understand it and reverse engineer it. And good lord, it was a very hard way of extracting a limited amount of knowledge. But it allowed me to to become a cryptographer and do some cool cryptograph cool research. Met some incredible influences. um people like Yens Grot, people like Ariel Gabazison, um like titans in their field who really helped to like mentor me and and and educate me and allowed um yeah um allowed us to to make some pretty pretty impressive breakthroughs in the field.

>> And I would say that you're pretty influential in the space yourself. I mean, that's how I got into ZK. So, I feel like it's you've had your your people that influenced you and then you've also in influenced another >> realm of people who will get into the ZK space. Um you should definitely go into a bit about those cryptographic breakthroughs what they were and >> all right so why they were so important >> oh I can talk about them yeah for sure so so the original one was called uh plon permutations over the lrange base for e in ecumenical nonacive arguments of knowledge um yeah um so so back in 2019 uh okay so back in 2019 you have zeke snarks you have ziki starks but the ziki starks really expensive to verify on a blockchain like ethereum

>> and the ziki snarks will require trusted setups. Um, and if you want, which we wanted at the time, like programmable business logic was how we viewed it. You know, like you you want to like define the some basic logical rules around around a financial transaction and keep them private. Um, you don't want all of your clients having to run their own trusted setups like these these at the time you were trying to financial institutions, people who like fat finger computers and like don't understand tech, we can't have them running trusted setups for every single app they want to use. So, so >> and for those who, sorry, just to interject for those who don't know what a trust is set up is sorry about a trusted setup is basically the idea is you got to generate some secret numbers um and um produce an encrypted version

of those secret numbers and if those the secret numbers ever leak you're you're doomed basically like people can fake your proofs they can break your proofs. >> So so um it's uh it's it's hard to do securely. you can do it securely but but um uh not you don't want to do it very frequently um because uh uh it's it's it's a huge overhead and like a mental overhead security overhead to pull this off. Uh and so in 2019 I was obsessed with this idea of saying okay can we make a fast zignark that either doesn't require a trust setup or has something we call a universal trust setup. The idea is you run this ceremony once to generate this

like this encrypted secret information >> uh >> that will work for every single Yeah. Yeah. every program >> you you only run it once and you forget about it. Um and at the time uh so I remember um I was I was devouring papers by Yens a titan in this field and he was basically this this talking about this idea this idea was which was crystallizing of of of separating out uh it's called like your your like circuit arithmetization and and your polinomial commitment scheme.

Basically the idea is you have to you have to u transform your your pro your computer program the thing you want to prove. You have to transform that into an algebraic form that you can easily create cryptographic proof server >> and then you need to prove that algebra and um these two steps were very unified back in the day and you had these very monolithic proving systems with their own strengths and weaknesses and what was starting to form is this idea of creating a more like modular way of building these proving systems. Um, and um, then there was this other paper called Sonic, which was basically the the first, it was a it was a universal snug, the thing I was searching for, but it was really slow, like painfully slow, impossibly slow. And so I'm thinking, okay, can I combine these ideas from

Yens with this with these with these sonic ideas and maybe make something that works? I had this this um looking back one of the one of one of the best times of my lives of my life basically like hanging out in a bougie cafe in in in Shortorditch um next to where I lived next to Yeah. next to where I [laughter] lived like um uh just with with with uh you with a notepad with these papers and just spending days after days in that coffee shop just like obsessively scribbling and trying to understand and trying to decipher extract information from these papers and see if I could rework it.

Um but uh that was uh but um I wasn't making much progress by myself. But then I went to a cryptographic conference uh I think it was actually just a blockchain conference. Um and I ran into Ariel uh who at the time was it Zcash uh and uh I I vaguely knew I knew of him by reputation but we met we hadn't we had met once before but not really. Um and somehow I I cornered him. started rambling about these problems I was experiencing and and struggling with. And um this is like to his immense credit he actually listened to me because normally at the time because I'm I was I'm like I I I'm not a formerly trained cryptographer. So the language

that I was particular at the time the language of cryptography that I spoke was was pretty uh broken you know it's a bit like you know somebody kind of turning up in English and going like you know like hello me Zach how are you like like sorry like like like not not I didn't speak it very well >> and and most academic cryptographers would look at me and they smile and they nod and they'd go on that way but listened to me and and I posed a problem to him basically this this concept of it's very common now called cyclic shifts basically I have this vector of information I've encrypted and encoded in in this zero knowledge form And uh I need I just need to do a I need to do like a left or right shift on this vector. That's all. And and um uh but

derive that shifted value from the encrypted form. That's that's and this was the missing thing I needed to get this these this snark working. And I couldn't figure it out. Um and I thought it was impossible. And then Ariel was like oh I'll think about it. Mhm. >> And then the next day I remember very clearly I was walking into this conference which was this office b like bunch of open time office space and I was walking past the sofa that Ariel was sitting in and he just leaned back and looked behind and he was like oh yeah by the way I solved that problem that you were working on and I'm like and and it's like this this this shocking moment where I'm like I do you do you have any idea what this means? Um so I I I grabbed him. We got into a side room and

we basically spent the whole day hashing out um what eventually after many months became Plunk. Um >> wow. >> Which is something we we we collaborated on over many months to put together. And yeah, that was >> and now we've got Honk and we've got Chonk and all these funny names. >> Punk, Ultra Plunk, Mega Plunk, Honk Chunk. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of stupid names. Um >> I mean that kind of explains I see on um Twitter fairly regularly and I'm sure it winds you up no end. uh why did it take so long? And I feel like this really answers that question is like you had to go right back to basics in the sense of like the principles. You had to go and build the the new proving system yourself and and come up with the new cryptographic primitives. Then you had

to build the virtual prover. You had to figure out all these different things like how do we get Zcash but with smart contracts like like like Ethereum for Bitcoin. And then now we're finally at the point where we have a ma where where there is a mainet. >> Yeah. And I would love to hear just to kind of like wrap things up, what you're most excited to see people build and then also maybe you can talk a little bit about what you're building for fun like the I know you were building some kind of chess example. It reminded me a bit of the it's a card game. I was going to say it reminded me a bit of the sort of 4D chess, you know, in Star Trek, but >> it was like an iteration on that, but a card game anyway. Yeah. So, so just to

get people excited about what they can build and what your what your kind So there's so there's um what I'm really excited by is is unlocking like a lot of the original grand visions for Ethereum, you know, like things that connect to the real world. I'm excited for things like >> using existing web 2 flows to to to log into your crypto accounts. I'm excited to create like for people to create >> um private stable coins. Uh, ideally I'm I'm always a big I'm always a big fan of them of make it out like ideally like maybe like experiment with collateralized stable coins but private um predict private prediction markets private um uh private private uh um OTC desks uh private governance as well. I think that um this is more of a passion project um uh of of mine a passion

hobby. I think that blockchain as a social technology, as a way of organizing communities and groups of people, has basically failed to materialize, but it was one of the original visions of blockchain um back in 2016, right? Like Ethereum launched the DAO project where the idea was it's going to be this community-led organization that in invests in various projects in the ecosystem. And there were these very lofty amii ambitions to basically create a a form of um social organization that was somewhere in the middle between a corporation and a charity. Um basically a collective group of people who were who have a common purpose and a shad goal. Um that they might be driven by profit, they might be driven by ideals, probably both. Um and

it gives them a technology where they can coordinate and execute without having to have decentralized middlemen, without having to have strong controlling actors. And this all obviously failed. We don't have powerful impressive decentralized autonomous organizations today. But I think a huge part of that is the lack of privacy technology. >> Um the fact that you can't do your governance votes privately. You these Dows don't have an understanding of who its contributors are. Um because you can't you can't put real world information into these smart contracts. Uh they can't even do things like payroll or treasury management privately which I think is a hu another thing I'm excited for private treasury management private to payroll. um private Agentic payments, X42 at scale things. You can do all of this with Aztec. Um >> yeah.

>> Uh and yeah, >> that's so exciting. >> Universe of things. >> Um well, that was a fantastic thing to um end this on. I think people can hopefully start building things um now that Alpha is live. And I also just wanted to say a massive congratulations that you you [clears throat] came all this way and then now alpha is live. Um and thank you very much for joining me in this podcast. It's a team effort. It's not just me and and and Joy Morris. There's uh there's over 80 of us now. So, >> yeah, there are some absolutely awesome people working on Aztec. I've had a pleasure of meet of meeting a vast majority of them and they're all >> very clever and also wonderful people.

So, you have the best minds behind it. >> I I'm very biased, but I I think I agree. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely 100%. Well, thank you so much, Zach. >> Thank you very much, K. And