Opening Talk: Noir and the Private World Computer

Transcript

Good morning, GMGM. Thank you everybody here for taking choosing [music] to spend your time at our third inaugural noon. >> All right. Hello everybody. Let's get this party started. Good morning, GMGM. Thank you everybody here for taking choosing to spend your time at our third inaugural Noir Con. Woo. I'm gonna have some things to say about this because honestly seeing this crowd, seeing the number of people here in the community building with noir, building amazing cool stuff in ZK, um it is it is a dream come true. Literally from when

we started this, we started Noir in 2020, uh 5 years ago. Um and to to see it come this far is is incredibly incredibly validating. Um, so this is Noiron, but I am uh as uh uh as as Zachary Williamson, I am the um uh co-founder of uh the Aztec Network. And so I have ulterior motives, and I'm a little biased, so I'm afraid this is going to be the five minutes, the equivalent of a 5-second YouTube advert. Um because Aztec has just launched you know Aztec and no are always supposed designed to be highly highly

complimentary to each other. We we are committed to creating and maintaining no as a public good and we are also in committed to using Noir as the cononical smart contract programming language for Aztec. Um and uh it's been a long journey. Uh but you know um who okay who here doesn't know about Aztec? Yeah. Okay. Oh okay. A couple people. So I'll do the explanation then. So we're privacy focused layer 2. Um we are um we'll take like the smart contract ecosystem of Ethereum. you know this incredible permissionless fully composable environment where you can write an application um you know it can handle some kind of financial product or service or reputation based system and

anybody else in the ecosystem can can in their application they can plug your application into it. This is how we get incredible products like uh unis swap you know like a like maker uh by having this kind of this seamless interoperability between products that are just built by like random different people who aren't really coordinating with each other. Uh but Ethereum in my opinion has a a problem I think that's that's widely acknowledged which is the lack of privacy. And so we set out to solve this in first principles. like okay let's do Ethereum but let's have private state as a first class primitive inside smart contracts where the data on chain is encrypted but you can write contracts that can query that state can

modify it um can put conditions on it uh and it's all backed up by zero knowledge proofs um so whoops um we are currently doing a token sale so um I'm not the most comfortable person doing some shilling but it is my statutory responsibility uh Um, basically our sale is now live if you are a early early uh user of Aztec or early community member. Um, and the full public sale will be in December. Um, so yeah, back to noir and privacy. I think privacy is going to eat the world in the same way that in from 2005 to 2015 software at the world. What do we mean

by this? Well, you go back to that time period and um you know the web was slow. It was niche. It wasn't widely used. And if you were a organization or an institution and you needed to do data processing, information processing that was done in a very physical and manual way. you know, you had you had information in filing cabinets or you had it in floppy discs being um like where you would be computing on these ancient old computers or even maybe like an IBM mainframe in the basement of your company that you rented from IBM. Um and it's it was it worked but it was very inefficient and it was very slow and then the internet came around and you had this process where all this data moved into the cloud and all this

information processing that took mechanical work with with hands and minds became automated and we and we got massive efficiency savings from that. But we had a there was a cost to that as well which is that we that created the current world where we have these web two titans that control huge data modes um not just for information processing but they monetize that information. You know when you use any web-based platform any platform it's going to be tracking you taking your data your data about who you are and it's going to consider it their property that they monetize.

And I say that privacy is going to eat the world because what's going to happen in my opinion is that products and services are going to be built hopefully by the people in this room that provide the same kinds of value to users but where the data and the information stays with the user and it's not hosted centrally and any information processing is done by zero knowledge proofs so that the core core data can stay client side can stay protected and you can use these distributed transaction ledgers as your settlements platform as your exchange platform as a source of liquidity as a source of customers and that's why I think privacy is going to eat the world

it is in many ways the ultimate fulfillment of the blockchain thesis from all those years ago which I think has not come to pass because of the lack of privacy so what is nor in all of this well we have a choice in web 3 um uh we can we can live with the current world where pretty much everything is transparent and everybody can see everything. Uh and that creates a warrantless financial surveillance dystopia. Uh there's I mean there's no doubt about it. You ask anybody in the space like anyone's seen it you know you talk to Vitalic and you're like hey what's the future if blockchain is massively used by everyone but there's no privacy. Is that a good future? He will say no. Well he might say maybe but lots of problems. uh this kind of you know surveillance panopticon

um is like the wet dream for an authoritarian leader or an authoritarian power structure. Um but you know they would lack the innovation, the innoviveness, the clarity of mind and purpose to build it. And so what's happened is all of these us these hackers, these outcasts, these cipher punks and cyber punks have ended up building surveillance technology accidentally. And no is one of the tools we're going to use to fix that. Um it is a programming language designed around Rust that uh um is private. Um it compiles not to machine code but to zero knowledge proofs so that you can um write a program where you have private information, hidden information. It's all encrypted but you can still do data and logic on it. So we started Noir 5

years ago. Uh Kev um who is our is the the godfather of Noir created the project. Um, and in November 2020, I was browsing I was browsing our uh version control and I saw the first release v0.0.1. Uh, nowadays, you know, you skip forward to November 2025. Uh, NAR is in its um pre-release stage. It's effectively feature complete. We are currently putting it through our through audit um so that we have something which is secure for the release of the Aztec network. Um, and we are intending for that process to be done soon, very soon. Um, I wish I could give more clarity, but uh, I don't want

to make the naughty team nervous here. So, just a little bit of a hello. Now, an example of how it started versus how it go how's it going. This might be a little too small to read, but this is the first release of Noir V 0.0.1. It's called errors. uh Noi used to be it was I mean it's a massive challenge to bootstrap a language from scratch like this uh you know compiling um an idiomatic like clear imperative programming language based on rust into zk proofs and it'd be fast feature complete is a monumental challenge um but I think we've managed to pull it off uh given the the number of people using it you know not only is it like Rust I would argue it has features that are better than Rust um

like our meta programming and our incredible macros ecosystem. So, how's it going today? Well, you've got products in the world using Noah, Ziki Passport, for example, which we're going to hear from today and their private face matching system. Um, we're using it in Aztec to um perform some very very light checks on users um so that uh America does not try to uh jail me. Uh sorry about that. Uh um and pay is migrating its uh stack to Noah because it's it's just the it's the cononical private language. That's what we designed it to be for our community. Um and now we have stateful Noir just like Node.js is the execution engine for

JavaScript. Um Aztec is an execution engine for Noir. Uh it's a transaction network where you can have persistent private state, persistent public state, and you can tap into it all with no define your state transition functions in smart contracts. Um uh so we're going to hear a lot from about that today in the ASIC room from 2 to 3 learn to write smart contract be there. It's going to be exciting. But we have an absolutely crazy schedule. I can't I couldn't imagine, you know, two years ago that not only would we be on our third No conference, but that we'd have three tracks three tracks of stuff to go to to talk about. You know, we have Oh god, I can't see a damn thing here. Sorry.

Um yeah, I mean like it's we got a huge amount of people from our ecosystem talking about the products that they're building, how to use Noir. We have people from the team talking about how to how to build like production grade libraries, idiomatic noir, how to write smart contracts. And we also have people from outside the like the the the direct no ecosystem but very very involved in privacy tech talking about their experiences and what they're doing in this space because it really is you know it is an entire village. We're all pulling in the same direction here. Um you know so we have people from like from Zashi talking about how they managed to build their wallets which is a was a was a was a fascinating challenge. So we got a really action-packed schedule for you all. You know, if you want to be part of the

privacy revolution, this is the place to be. Everyone's saying, "Oh, it's privacy season. What does that mean?" Well, you're going to find out today here what that really means. And when people say over the next 10 years, everything's going to be private. You're part of that first wave, right? The train, the first train is leaving the station. And you know there is an ocean of opportunities out there because the design space of what you can do not just in web 3 but in any kind of transaction or exchangebased system where counterparties don't or can't trust each other um and you need to perform logic validation over sensitive information.

If you need to preserve information asymmetries then this is the technology. This is the place to be to do all of that and it's going to change the world. Finally, before I before I get off and we start talking about um getting into the weeds of things, I want to thank Stella and Protocol Labs because they very kindly agreed to sponsor this event. Um and uh yeah, two incredible teams uh massively helping out the privacy ecosystem. So, thank you very much. Uh let's go LFG. [applause]