How to Start Building on Aztec

Transcript

[music] We've got some big shoes to fill. We've already heard about alpha is live, the big announcement, and we've heard about the primitives baked into the protocol. And now I want to spend the next 30 minutes with you to really get practical because I think a lot of people watching this could be developers, retail audience, whoever are in could be interested in building on Aztec. And so I want to ask you right out of the gate,

can I actually build on this today >> on alpha? Yes, you can. All the whole stack, all of the tooling is already there. It's already built. It is iterating and changing, which I mean I think is exciting because it means that you have input today. You can be like, I don't like this thing. Alo is way better in solidity. And you can be like, okay, yeah, we can implement that. So you have input, but all the whole stack is there. All of the tools are there. And in my opinion, they're pretty nice and it's pretty nice to build on Aztec. I mean, I know I'm biased, but >> I think it's pretty good. I think it's object objectively, it's fantastic. So, >> yeah. [laughter] >> And so, building building a private app, when someone hears that,

>> when I hear that, I think, okay, maybe this is a really complex process to build a private app. >> Yeah. >> Uh, but in our previous conversations, and by the way, you're an amazing educator. Oh, stop it. Stop that. No, no, no, no. We're not having any too British. [laughter] >> Well, a little shout out to you. You have great educational content out there. Yeah, absolutely. And you make it wonderful for people who may just be diving in for the first time, right? And so, that's what I hope to do. So, you were telling me previously >> that Aztec has actually made this process surprisingly approachable, right? I wouldn't necessarily say it's the easiest process, but it is quite approachable.

>> Okay. So, I definitely wouldn't use the word easy uh because that's obviously subjective and it depends on the person, but we have simplified the process as much as possible. >> I'm going to take a little bit of time and go into that if that's >> Yeah, walk us through the layers of the stack. >> Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah, let's do that. So, the first thing is you don't need to understand any ZK moon math. You don't really need to understand the ZK terminology like I mean plon and honks and chunks and bariton bug and you got gr 16 and like circuits and constraints. Actually you do need to know the word constraint but anyway I digress. We have made it simpler. So we have our own smart smart contract programming language. Well actually we have our own we only we have our own programming

language called noir. I say we I had no hand in building this. Actually, when I started, I learned Noir because I was trying to learn ZK and I was like, you don't actually really need to know the math because we have the abstractions on top, which was at the time CIRCOM. And then Noir came along and kind of was like, okay, here's here's a different language which is based on Rust. So, Noir is very very similar to Rust. All of the components of the language are very similar. Um, we can go into that in a little bit more detail later if you want. Absolutely. But for the Rust developers out there, your life is much much easier. So we have Noir and for those who understand what a circuit is and writing ZK programs, Noir is a language for doing exactly that. So

Circom alternative. And then to write smart contracts on Aztec, we have an extra layer which is a framework called Aztec NR. And this makes the syntax for writing smart contracts much simpler. all of the complexities of Aztec which make it different from Ethereum nice and easy. Hang on, I said myself I wouldn't use the word easy. They make it more approachable. Exactly. So interacting with private states um and how that works is a much more simplified and streamlined process and we really keep in mind solidity developers. So to trying to make it kind of sim as similar to solidity as possible in terms of just

yeah just the syntax to be honest. Yeah. So then you'd use Noir and then AztecNr to write your smart contract and then you obviously want to deploy and interact with that smart contract. And to do that we have AztecJS. So AztecJS is a JavaScript library which does exactly what I just said. And that is pretty simple and nice and easy just as you would expect. So it's like Wagmei or Ethers but for the for the Aztec ecosystem instead. So you don't have to understand any ZK math. You don't have to >> you don't have to be a cryptographer.

>> You don't have to be a cryptographer. You don't need to be a gigabrain. I mean the math is fun. So if you want to learn it, you can totally learn it if you want. But >> I totally encourage people to learn the math if >> Yeah. But you don't have to. I when people ask me questions about this and they come to the booth. >> You're very popular at the booth, by the way. >> Thank you. that you're really popular at the boob. [laughter] >> Um yeah, so they they often say like, "Oh, I need to learn the math and everything like that." And I'm like, "No, because when you start in Ethereum and you're writing Solidity smart contracts, you don't need to know how to write raw op codes. You just write solidity and then it compiles to op codes, right? So it's kind of the same

thing like you don't need to know anything about the proving system, how it works, all the all the things that power it. You can instead just use Aztec art to write your smart contracts. Exactly the same principles. So you would say that a de a developer building on one of the other blockchains, right? Maybe they're using Rust. What would the learning curve be? >> It would be much simpler than someone who doesn't know Rust for sure because the concepts are similar. You have things like attributes, macros, traits, things like that. You don't need to know Rust. Like I didn't know Rust. The learning curve is definitely slightly steeper if you don't know Rust, but you can get by without it. Once you know what a macro is and kind of the fact that, you know, you add it at the top of the function or whatever. Going too in

the weeds here, but once you kind of know around about what it does, you you're fine. So, I think if you yeah, if you do know if you do know Rust, the process of writing a smart contract is it's not it shouldn't be too bad. I'm not a Rust developer myself as I said, so lots of T's and C's apply there, but from what I've heard, it's not too bad. It's pretty good. >> Yeah, I've heard the same thing. >> Yeah. And also people I I had a question earlier at the booth and he was saying, "Oh, is it has it got better?" Because it was pretty bad when I tried. So if anyone out there is like, I tried writing smart contracts half a year ago, things have moved on significantly. The syntax has improved significantly. The developers have done an absolutely incredible job improving Aztec NR and

also AztecJS like they are they are really really nice to work with. Now you can also test smart contracts in Aztec NNR as well. So do unit tests in Aztecr. So it's a bit like how you have solidity tests with with foundry kind of the same thing but you have >> you don't have to switch language to write your unit tests which is also nice and that wasn't a thing six months ago I don't think. >> Maybe it was but anyway >> it's a relatively new thing. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of people are going to be really really excited to see what they can build exactly. And now's the right time. You know, >> 100%. [clears throat] >> One thing I found really elegant, you know, about Aztec.

>> And I don't know if you have to make >> One of the things I found really elegant about Aztec is that you don't necessarily have to make everything private. >> Mhm. Yeah. [clears throat] I think that's a common misconception is they're like, "Oh, Aztec has got a privacy, so therefore everything's private." >> But you can choose. You can choose. So you have private state and you also have public state. I like to talk about this like lands, right? So you have you have private land and you have public land. You can choose for some of your state and also your execution. When I talk about execution, I just mean so like if you're a dev when I talk about execution, I mean literally the functions like the the functions themselves where are they being executed? Where is that logic being executed? So you can have public and

private execution as well. public and private state and also public and private execution. >> With public and private state, the best example I think is with a token contract. So you might want to choose because everything you can choose. We tried to make it open-ended and composable as you like. I say we this was definitely stuff before me like way before me. The royal we of course the royal. Um >> yeah so with a token contract you might want to have private balances and I don't want to see your balance. You don't want me to wait. I don't want you to see my balance.

>> I definitely don't want you to see my balance. [laughter] >> You don't want me to see All right. You don't want me to see your balance, but maybe you want to have a public total supply. Or if you were doing like lending and borrowing, you might want the the threshold of a health factor or something to be to be public, but you want the actual individual health factors to be private. So, you can kind of pick and choose what you want. And same with execution. You can pick and choose what functions you want to be public and what you want to be private. And it's a bit overloaded with the term private because you also have solidity private and that's to do with the visibility. I mean private in terms of where it's being executed, where is the logic being run? Um yeah, >> I like I like the uh the way you put it

about the public and private land. I always thought about like you can mix and match your privacy, the different levels that you need for whatever you're building. Obviously, people are going to have different needs depending on what they build, what jurisdictions they live in, etc. And it seems like we have all of the functionality and the optionality to give them exactly what they need. >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. >> That's perfect. And so thinking about it like because it's not an all or nothing approach, no one's forced for an all or nothing approach here. You can have for example like a public leaderboard with private individual scores right in the same app.

>> Tell us a little bit about that. Like maybe you can dive a little bit deeper on what exactly is possible. >> What is possible? >> Oh, I don't know. I feel like I'm not the right person to ask about what is possible. I feel like Joe covered really what what you can build um in terms of what Yeah. I don't know like Oh yeah. I mean, I guess with with a you can pick and choose, right? So, put me on the spot here a little bit, but like not not that it's your fault or anything. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. But like with a leaderboard, okay, this is a good example. With the leaderboard, you could have the total like rankings of all the individual people be be public. You could even have like their total score at the end of the whole

>> what do you call it? Like competition. That's a good word. Competition be public. But then you could have each individual round like the actual score breakdown be private. So that's kind of cool, right? Like you can you can pick and choose. >> I love seeing all the ideas people come up to the booth with. >> Yeah, they come up with loads of tons of stuff. build this, I want to build that. >> And I don't want to give any spoilers away because it's their ideas, right? Some really interesting things where I never would have thought about it. >> No, I feel like I just lose all my creativity when when someone comes up to me, they're like, "Oh, what should I build?" I'm like, "I don't do you know what? I can't think of anything now."

Private payments is definitely something I'm excited about though. I feel like that's the primary one >> I'm really excited about. Yeah. >> Yeah. Private payments. It could be a game changer. >> It could be. >> Yeah, it will be. It will be. Oh, wow. >> Private OTC OTC desks. But yeah, Joe covered all the use cases in a lot of detail. So I feel like he's probably better to listen to about that. I'm more of a nerd like love to go into like the tech of it and >> right and then >> well then let's go into the tech of it. So I wanted to dig into something that I thought was genuinely novel when I heard about it which is >> the idea that private proofs the proofs are generated on the client side right I think that's a huge deal. So tell us

about the private execution environment and what does that mean for privacy? So, like I was saying, you have private land and you have public land. And the reason I call them lands is because they're completely distinct. They I mean they they don't really cross over. They communicate one by not birectionally, one directionally. They communicate one directionally. So in private land is where all it's local. So that is completely offchain and that is your local machine. So your laptop or your phone, anywhere that can store data and then execute logic. That is all where all of your private data is stored. And that is in the Pixie, which stands for private execution

environment, Pixie. Yeah, it's pretty cute, isn't it? It's a fun name. >> It is. We also have a Trixie, but I'm not going to go into it. Um, >> and so yeah, so all of your all of your private data is stored in your Pixie, which is just a local database. The Pixie is actually a a JS library and it's implemented by your Aztec wallet. So the Aztec wallet will handle all of this for you. You'll never interact directly with the pixie. You know how we were saying earlier about how we have lots of abstractions. >> I'm explaining all of this to kind of like nerd snipe people a bit. But you won't actually have to handle any of this yourself. The developers don't really need to touch it unless you were developing your own wallet and the users certainly won't have to. But the pixie

is where your private execution happens, where the private functions are run. Any private date that data that's read or modified is in the pixie. Then once you've finished in your private land and you've done everything that you need to do to interact with your private state and execute any private logic, then you're going to move to public land. Public land is completely onchain. It's on the sequencer and that's where all your public data is stored and your public execution happens. So you finish everything in private. Then you send a zk proof of the execution and any state changes to the sequencer. The sequencer will then verify that proof. They'll do something called add adding like side effects. I'm not going to go into that.

You can look in the documentation if you want to see more about that. That's just how the private data is managed and verified. But then on in public land on the sequencer on the node then you'll have the the public execution. So crucially you can only go that one direction. You can't be like, "Okay, now I've I've modified this public state. Now go back to private land and do something else." You can't do that. You have to start in private land and end in public land. Can't go back the other way. >> I want to reiterate something because we talk about this a lot, right? And so some of these ideas, while they're exciting to us, I think the novelty of them, right, how new they are and how much of a game changer they are,

sometimes we can have difficulty communicating that. And I want to go back to the private execution environment of the Pixie because it's >> you can generate a proof >> on your phone. Yeah. >> Right. >> Yeah, you can. >> That's huge. >> That is huge. Yeah. I feel like I just I hear it every day. So it's like, oh yeah, obviously you can. Actually, someone someone asked it at the booth the other day. They were like, but like that takes a long time, right? And I'm like, no, it's of the order of like 10 to 20 seconds. I think that might be wrong. I think it's something like that. And then you can do the proving on the on your phone as well. I mean, even with ZK Passport, right, you can create a proof on your phone when you use ZK Passport. If anyone participated in the

token sale, use ZK Passport. And uh it was actually really funny. I'm going to give a little anecdote if that's okay. Do you have time? >> Yeah, of course. Sure. They were they were going to implement because people were swiping off of the proof generation cuz it does take like 20 seconds or something. They were going to build like a little pinball like tilt table game so that people didn't swipe off of it. And then it used too I think it was like the problem was it used too much memory to be able to implement it. But I thought that was really funny. Um but yeah you can the what I'm saying is that you can generate the proof on your phone. You can generate the proof on your computer.

It's really cool. Like you don't need any specialist >> and your data stays private >> anything and then your data stays private because it's private because it's not on chain, right? Like only you have access to it and then the proof is generated on your local machine and verified on chain. So it's like verifying that your data and all the state transitions are correct. >> And that's it. >> Pretty cool. >> And [laughter] that's it. >> You eight years of work down into and that's it. Magic. [laughter] >> And so basically the effect of that is people get real privacy. They don't have to understand ZK proofs. They don't have to I mean we talked about that before.

>> I mean users don't have to understand anything, right? Like you have I presume social social media. >> I would presume so. [laughter] I think I might have social media. [laughter] Average Joe has social media and we use the internet or internet shopping or whatever browsing and they won't understand how the internet actually works, right? Like they won't know any of the code. It's like someone said to me, "Oh, I can't use blockchains because they're too complex." And I'm like, if you don't want to be a developer, if you just want to be a user, then you absolutely don't need to know any of that. And it's exactly the same thing. Like, no one really needs to understand ZK. It's just the tech that powers the use case, which is private data, >> which is really cool. Onchain. Onchain.

Private data. The private data is offchain, but the proof is verified on chain. [snorts] >> And so, moving on to the next section, like >> I want to the heavy lifting happens on the user's device, you know, [clears throat] >> and the network it just verifies the proof. We talked about that previously. Yeah. >> As a developer, you don't have to orchestrate any of that yourself. and thinking just about how remarkable that is, the complexity that that kind of removes for the user.

>> But it's even better than that now, isn't it? >> It is. It is even better than that. And I want to talk about the complexity issue, right? So we're we're talking about removing the complexity from the user. I want to talk about removing the complexity for the developer, right? So maybe we can >> even better >> because now we have AI. Yay. everyone talks about. >> Yeah. It's going to steal all of our jobs. No, it just makes our lives easier, right? >> Yeah. And developers now, they're expecting AI. Yeah. Right. >> Yeah. They are. And I consider myself a bit of an AI newbie. I'm not particularly well-versed in AI. I haven't spent a ton of time looking into it. In fact, like I often ask Josh, who's um head of Devrell.

>> Being a resident of the Bay Area, you can't throw a stone without hitting someone talking about AI. >> Josh is fantastic, right? He knows a lot about AI and he has built an MPC server for Aztec. So, you can I don't know if the terminology is right, so bear with me here. I'm going to sound like an idiot, but it's okay. It's okay. I don't mind. I am an idiot. Self-confessed. >> You install the plugin which uses the MPC server. Don't know if that's right. Adds the MPC server. I have done it myself. Like I used it in my course which is coming up [laughter] to build Aztec smart contracts. That might make it easier as well. This is not a shameless plug at all.

>> No, no, no, no, no, not at all. Um, but yeah, we have an MPC server which makes it really easy to build, even easier to build on Aztec because then it has all of the context of Aztec ready to go with claw code or whatever it is that you want to use. I actually don't know any other alternatives. Cursor. >> Well, let's dive in to what the developer experience for building on Nastec would be, right? >> Yeah. So, first entry point would be the documentation of course. And so we actually have a page in the docs. I think it's just called AI tools.

I want to say it's really high up so you won't miss it. And that just shows you how to use the MPC server. And I think we have some skills and things like that because it's one for um updating your code. And because things are iterating so fast, it is really important to be able to easy easily and efficiently update your code to the latest version. So there's a skill for claw claw code or whatever it is that you want to use to update your code and there's lots of skills to learn about Aztec as well. So if you did want to learn, you talk about the developer experience.

>> Teach me >> one to one. I don't know. This is super >> while you're in the hot seat. I thought I'd ask. >> Um yeah, so you can use AI to not only scale your I mean everyone will obviously know this, but you can obviously use it to make the development process faster, but also for the learning process, make that so much faster. When I'm talking about it in um courses, I always encourage people to use AI. I feel like people are a bit hesitant to use it straight away and I'm like but if you're using it to learn as long as you're not saying hey claw claw code build me a smart contract no mistakes like obviously you're not going to learn it yeah I type like this >> oh okay [laughter] I didn't know that >> then then obviously you're not going to

learn anything but if you've built a couple of smart contracts on your own maybe with some assistance I don't know from AI but as long as you're able to read and understand exactly what's happening and understand the syntax then you can use things like the MPC server to write smart contracts and then you can effectively just verify it's doing what you said it's going to do. A bit like invariant testing. You could write some invariant tests and be like oh this definitely does what I expect it to do and then that will accelerate the the development process. But then also you can use it to ask questions about oh this this thing seems really weird on Aztec like how does this work? And by using things like the MPC server, feel like I've said that phrase like 10 times, it already has the knowledge preloaded. So then it can answer your

questions accurately, right? Which is useful. >> The cool thing about it is, and you were getting back to this, like some people are hesitant to use AI. >> I think you need to find that middle ground that you were talking about, which is you don't need to use it for everything. >> You should use it. >> Yeah. 100%. you're kind of like limiting yourself and you're I mean I don't like saying falling behind but like you you need to keep up with >> it on your ideas like much more quickly much more quickly and then if you need to troubleshoot that it helps you do that too.

>> Yeah 100% >> absolutely >> and we want to make the process for developers as easy but also as fun as possible. say I hear >> what >> somewhere that there's something exciting that developers who want to build on Aztec or are already building on tech can get involved with how would they like meet other developers and hear what's going on or if they if they were to hear about some course for instance where would they be able to hear about that >> of course of course you said well I think the best place for developers especially building on Aztec going with >> Noir >> the noir discord server huge >> hub for developers, but also there's something new coming out, >> which is the developer handle on X Aztec_Dev.

>> That's so exciting. >> It is exciting. >> So, what did you say was Aztec_Dev? That's right. So, you can go there for what? >> You can go there for developer interviews, updates, hot takes, spicy memes. Well, privacy memes rather. >> I was going to say >> no, not that. >> Privacy memes. Privacy memes. and uh get to know all the other developers, get to know the team really well, right? Get to know people who are building on Aztec. It's going to be a wonderful time. >> That's so fun. >> I would say if you can follow the account, I think we just made it today.

>> Oh, it's already up there. >> It's already up there. >> Oh, I need to give a follow then. Oopsies. Sorry. >> I think it's following you. >> Is it? Oh, no. That's That's awkward. Sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't notice. My bad. >> And we're going to have more content out. So, different team interviews, people are building on Aztec. It's going to be a great time. And like I teased earlier, I'm hoping there's like some people who might be interested. I am building a course on writing smart contracts for Aztecs. And I take you through from the start like how does the stack actually work? >> Like it is different from Ethereum. So how is the state managed? How does it work in private land? And how does it work in public land? I've tried to simplify it as much as I can so that

you're a developer. Let's say you're and I've assumed you're a Solidity developer and making that process from being a Solidity developer to an Aztec developer as smooth as possible. We build a tok a counter contract and then a token contract give you all the prerequisites and then from there you can go off and build loads of super exciting stuff. >> Your courses are always fun. >> Thank you. Thank you so much. >> Exciting and relatable. So, I look forward to the next one. >> I hope so. I was quite tired when I filmed this one. So, [laughter] well, I'm hoping, fingers crossed, it'll be good, but I've added some hopefully fun little funny moments in there. I'm hoping. Um, but that should be that.

>> Oh, good question. I was just about to segue onto that. You did it. It was a nice little question. That was very nice. Um, so hopefully that should be next week. No, >> that will be next week and they'll be able to access it presumably on the Aztec developer Twitter. So, they should they should follow the Aztec developer Twitter if they want. #_Dev everyone. >> Thank you a dev. >> And with that I do want to say it's time. Thank you so much. >> A thank you Rob. >> It was my pleasure. My pleasure speaking with you. And I want to say thank you all for listening in. Huge day for Aztec. Alpha is live. Transactions are live and people can start building on the network. So everyone, Gastec, we'll see you next time.

>> Tech. Thank you for tuning in everyone. This has been an absolute pleasure and yeah, it's just been a really fun time. So, I am really excited to see what you guys all build as well.