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.