What is Aztec

Transcript

[Music] AIC is a privacy first layer 2 blockchain for Ethereum. We want to recreate the smart contract system of Ethereum, but one where you have private information, where you can put private data on chain in an encrypted form, but still prove statements about it. So why do we focus on privacy as opposed to scaling which is much more common?

Well, we do a bit of scaling for sure, but for me it's it's always been straightforward. We want to make blockchains real. We want to make this technology touch the real world, be part of the infrastructure that we use in our day-to-day lives. And for that to happen, it means you need to link identities to cryptocurrency accounts. And for that it means you need to put sensitive information on chain so smart contracts can understand who you are and for that you need high quality privacy protections. So for us it was a no-brainer.

So why not build privacy directly into an existing base layer? Well we originally tried to do that. Originally we were a company called credit mint. We wanted to create a um private financial product. The difficulty is that these these blockchain networks are set up to be transparent within their very bones. Uh the architecture it's all based around transparency and retrofitting on privacy is is complicated. The state model of these blockchains assumes information is public and widely shared and even just encrypting data on public blockchains isn't enough because you can observe how that encrypted data changes to to to glean information. What we really found out the hard way was that

we needed to do a first principles pass through of what a blockchain is uh and design one from the ground up that has privacy and private semantics baked into its very core has an understanding of what zero knowledge cryptography is baked into its course that we can abstract away all of these nuances and difficulties from the developer. Aztec's long-term vision is to be the default uh global marketplace of programmable assets, programmable money. We want to see a world where it's not just synthetic tokens that are commoditized on on blockchain networks, but real world assets, real claims to property, to intellectual property, and that these can be freely traded, programmed,

exchanged without barriers, without friction. That's the money side. Longer term, we also want to see Aztec used for very high volume payment networks. We want to see Aztec become a home for credentials on blockchains where you have attestations about who you are, what you're doing. They're all being placed on chain on the Aztec network, but in an encrypted way where you, the individual, you control the fundamental data and you choose how it gets shared. And what happens is we can build up a holistic understanding of a person's identity or or an entity's identity and then that can be used in downstream applications. They can be financial, they can be social, they can be web 2, they can be web 3 native and uh it it

turns blockchain into what has creators always wanted it to be which is a a powerful novel um communication network.