Privacy, the Missing Link I Zac Williamson at Pragma Denver 2025

[Music] and for this I'd like to bring on Zach who's the co-founder and CEO of Aztec to talk about privacy the missing link please give Zach a big round of applause hello cool hi everyone as KC said it's not happy hour yet so I don't expect to see any smiling faces welcome uh I am I'm Zack I am the uh CEO and co-founder of Aztec and we are a privacy first uh layer to for ethereum um and I'm here to talk about privacy and why I think that this is the missing link to make not just ethereum but the entirety of blockchain kind of um mainstream useful Global infrastructure uh so I've been I've been saying stuff like this for the last seven years so if you've heard me talk before you might have heard some of this but maybe not um I think you know right now we are experiencing strange times in the world you know the information age has brought so much value to humanity you know the information Super Highway the fact that we can just look up information instantly at our fingertips have the sum of all human knowledge available to us um able to communicate with people across the world seamlessly it is a very radical world that's being created and and and a huge amount of good has happened but also uh a lot of dangerous things um negative things you know the like the the trust between each other is very much frayed uh where you know the information we consume online we can't even we don't know if it's genuine if it's sincere if it's created by human if it's created by a bot if it's created by um you know um good faith actors or bad faith actors and uh the information networks that we have right now are rather ly flawed and we need some new ones uh this is basically like the basic thesis of crypto right giving people control of their own money putting it out of the hands of Institutions and governments allows us to more freely express our intents to one another allows us to more effectively coordinate to on shared goals whether having to rely on trusted intermediaries that we really should not trust so why does privacy matter um what is privacy fundamentally well like because it's it's a very G vague words so in this context I mean you can prove something um that's derived from information you're not sharing so for example here like I could have a passport UK passport it signs a digital signature I can give you that digital signature and that proves that I possess a a UK passport um and if you can hide information about that that that signature so you could hide the name or the age then you're proving something without revealing the underlying information or it could be I could prove to you that my cryptocurrency account has like more than uh $500 in it without revealing to you my actual value um it's an information asymmetry um it's Bas it's being able it's knowing it's being able to to act on information that you know that somebody else doesn't know which is at the moment not really possible in a decentralized system and this creates huge problems um because without these information symmetries you cannot have meaningful onchain identities you cannot have meaningful like Trust attestations between things that happen outside of the web three bubble and within it um and you you you struggle to build meaningful trust infrastructure technology um you know I think that the whole like trustless um narrative is slightly flawed I don't want to live in a world where I don't have to trust anybody I want to live in a world where it's very easy for me to trust people um and you know this is the kind of world that we're trying to build with Aztec um okay so why do I think privacy is is important what I've said what is privacy why privacy um and if we think about the fundamental value in blockchain like where is it from at the moment I I would argue there's only three sources you have the value from uh assets you know money um uh you have value from so hang economy right back J act um the fundamental value is basically is most of it almost all of it is derived from two sources there's the economic value of consensus on a network and there's dollar back stable coins um by economic value I mean like of consensus I mean like how much are people willing to pay to get a transaction on chain how much are people willing to pay to have an like an immutable record or source of Truth you know that's what backs the value of Bitcoin and of ethereum and then you have dollar back stable coins but this is a relatively small Revenue Universe compared to you know the world's financial markets we get blinded by that a bit because there's a lot of money in crypto in absolute terms but you if like if you take the stated names of crypto in good faith you know replace the world's Financial systems then the revenue univers is Tiny and it's because you we can't access sources of value from outside those two areas right if the value of ethereum went to zero the value of every single token on ethereum apart from usdc and maybe usdt would go to zero um and so why is that well it's because we can't pierce the web three bubble right now we lack the technology I would argue that these are the three ingredients you need to move Beyond these two sources of value stti coins and consensus to to to more to things that are more grounded in the real world um I think you need to be able to interface with web2 systems from web3 you need to be able to to extract data from web2 software web2 services and products and put it inside a smart contract and be able to have trust that data is accurate you trustless articles from web 2 um you need to ass solve we need to ass solve the account abstraction problem with things like web 2 authorization right instead of having public private keys or special ethereum keys or ethereum passports or social consensus blah blah blah blah no no no no no just sign in with Google or sign in with apple or you know sign in with your existing methods you know instead of making web 3 its own unique thing make it work with these existing Technologies uh and being able to prove data Providence from outside the web three bubble is is vital to actually bring meaningful information and from outside of web 3 into web 3 to get outside of that consensus bubble um and once you do that you can you can start to also link accounts to identities so instead of me being oxf 33334 or you know Elon Musk fanboy. eth or you know whatever it is like instead I could say my name is Zachary James Williamson I am a British Citizen and a taxpayer I live in London you know here is my address um I work as a software engineer uh here is my salary um if you can prove that kind of stuff within a web 3 smart contract ecosystem then that allows you to unlock powerful powerful Primitives uh because you can prove not just not to not to a counterparty not to another person you proove to a Smart contractor a piece of computer code things like who you are um and that means that you can build decentralized Financial systems that can have an understanding of who human beings are and apply rudimentary compliance techniques and I know compliance is a dirty word but if you want to talk tap to the talk to the real world that's going to be necessary in some way um and giving developers optionality to program that in I think is going to be vitally important to actually getting real world adoption um and then the final part which I think is the hard part really is establishing digital sovereignty basically being able to establish precedence that uh digital ownership of an asset on chain implies a legal claim to property in the real world to assets in the real world that can be enforced by a trusted real world legal system um if you can do this the world changes and this step will not happen unless you can build systems products and services that require the step to be useful you know right now if I'm trying to do something with real world assets on chain I have to rely on third party data Brokers or trusted intermediaries uh uh because I can't put that information on chain I can't put my social security number on chain or whatever I mean I could but it'll be bloody stupid um but if you can build decentralized applications which can handle um complicated assets uh accet in a regulated space um if you can establish like and and demonstrate to the world that there is an enormous amount of value on the table for governments or states to actually like be to to to to create some really radical prpt legislation in this regard then then the world changes and all the three of these steps require privacy technology if you want to um prove data Provence you need you need you need privacy Tech you need ZK if you want to link your identity with real world um uh on and offchain um components you need you need privacy Tech without doxing yourself um and so like you know 2025 has been a bit of a weird year for crypto right uh can you believe that the Trump meme coin launch is only a month old I feel so old some like with when when when I when I when I when I'm told things like that um you know right now it's just celebrity meme coins and scams and nonsense right and um and and I've been saying this for for years I'm a broken record right like the the design space of what you can do with a smart contract hasn't changed in years and so there's not a lot of innovation on that level at the app layer um and the reason for that is because there's no goddamn privacy so you can't do things which which P outside this web three bubble and that's what we're trying to change with a privacy is decentralization what do I mean by that I mean that if you want to create this if if we if we can pierce the web 3 bubble in these in these kinds of ways then you need if you if you want to do that in a way that ises non-custodial you have to have zkm privacy uh because otherwise you need centralized data custodians um and then you then you have entities which are going to be considered you know um responsible they're going to be considered money transmitters even you say oh they're not touching funds they're just holding data that's not really I mean that's that's kind of a synthetic abstraction at some level um and so in my mind they this like privacy Tech the one of the reasons you can you can tell that it's very important is because a network like Aztec right we are launching our test net imminently from day one it's going to be decentralized our main net from day one is going to be decentralized and that's not because of some like like some vague you know prb values alignment nonsense is because we have to be decentralized because of the nature of what this network is like Bitcoin like ethereum this is not the case for most networks launching today um but you know through through our actions we can we demonstrate that privacy technology is fundamentally values aligned with decentralized distributed ledgers so how do we build this missing link right how do you okay how do you get privacy right because right now if you want to do stuff in ZK you need to you know you need you need an enormous amount of domain knowledge a lot of skills it's very hard to use the software and the tooling is really not there yet um and so here are the three ingredients right you need a programming language that is presents an idiomatic way of writing program smart contracts that work on encrypted state that will and that program will get transformed to Z proof and this needs to happen as an abstraction layer so I as a normally developer or engineer can just write my smart contract you then need a private blockchain which will execute that that is the execution engine for the smart contracts um uh you know a blockchain where you have support for private state for private programmable semantics where the idea of a private contract calling on a private contract makes sense where you can have a message Center that's unknown this requires like a radical redesign of what a blockchain is from the ground up and then on top of that you then need a state-of-the-art cryptographic engine basically technology that will allow a user to construct these ridiculously Advanced knowledge proofs in a reasonable time frame to provide good us experience this is what Aztec has been building this is the Aztec Network and um it's taken us eight years but we're nearly there now and so I want to talk a little bit about not what can be created in the world but what what what you can do today what's um uh because you know this isn't this is uh this is the stuff that's new uh this year because previously I've just been saying oh this is the world that could be created but our technology is now Advanced enough that you can do meaningful useful stuff with us so what is Noir you know Noir is a programming language it's rust likee that will compile down to ZK circuits it's agnostic to any underlying cryptographic proving system um it compiles to an intermediate representation that can be proven with any like technology that supports that IR so worldcoin is building an integration uh so it's not just Aztec doing this um you can make fast client side proof generation for photos and web browsers you can do things like prove Providence of an email in under 5 Seconds we have a pre-release of 1.0 um and for most web 2 crypto graphic Primitives we have pretty good support now um and this is something which is missing from a lot of the kind of ZK landscape um if you want to do ringful stuff that Taps into the real world you need to work with these really ugly nasty cryptographic Primitives in the web TW space that were developed you know in the early 2000s and the 1990s that are just that are just nasty um and not very zuk friendly uh and you can do that in a while and one of the fastest growing developer ecosystems in web 3 um what no unlocks and Aztec unlocks is this concept of private composability you know right now if you want to do SUB GK you can you can write a circom ciruit you can write a little program that will do like a u some some private actions but that's not composable with anything else uh because you know you you have you need custom software to do that custom infrastructure and then any other application which integrates with your application needs that custom software infrastructure and it's just not scalable that's what a network like Aztec solves from the ground up uh you can have a private smart contract that calls another private smart contract that calls another private smart contract and that's just one user transaction you know it acts like a normal regular blockchain um which is quite hard to achieve in in this space um and it's being used to build the future web 3 today so this is just some of the examples um of what's happening on Noir today uh you know we have um trustless peer-to-peer on and off boarding um from crypto to Fiat via the Europe's open banking API so I can send you say um money directly via this API you send me tokens uh that gets converted into like an atomic transaction via ZK and VI via some escra facilities um and it allows people who do don't know each other don't trust each other to um um uh to exchange tokens um for for real world Feld you know Bank grade private security tokens are being built with us with no um you've got passport grade onchain credentials with ZK passport you can prove you know your your your nationality on chain Anonymous social media with a non-cast you can post anonymously um trustless proofs of email ZK email built in now um and uh you know on the ASC Network we're building we we've got teams building privacy preserving wallets and creating the seats of real dbanks like not not dbanks where you just trade around synthetic tokens but ones where you can provide quality Financial Services uh that's the end goal at least you know so that you can provide the kind of financial infrastructure to the entire world that people in in the developed World take for granted so this is the Noir 1.0 road map we are last time I gave this talk a few months ago like the little speech bubble was a bit to the left and nowc to the right so we are on target which is rare in web 3 um but um you know we're close to our audit freeze uh then we're um yeah uh got our pre-release out uh you know so we're we're on target for our audited release of 1.0 um that is an old QR code don't scan that sorry about that so that's the no side that's the programming language side so where is Aztec in 2025 where's the Aztec Network other than like right here um our public test net is imminent uh I wish I could say more uh but um we uh we're doing some final shakedowns internally some stability testing but we are yes um uh yeah that should be launched that's some some point um we're fully decentralized from day one uh you know and with it you can do feature Rich end to end encrypted web three transactions where you can you can send a transaction where you hide who you are you hide the smart contracts that you're calling and you hide all the data that's being exchanged so you can do a private token transfer and nobody knows what's happened um you can do a uh you can do a private token transfer which has compliance like requirements because it's real world assets and again nothing gets broadcast to the world um you can in our in inside a web browser on commodity Hardware you can prove a private transfer in under 20 seconds um we're working on this we're improving this this is not uh going to be the uh the state of play when we launch our mainnet but even even today right that's uh um quite quite a radical um uh Improvement on on what on on on where we thought we'd be uh and you know the goal at launch is to basically have a web two style user experience um yeah and you know you can generate inter transactions on on most phones and laptops uh this is our road map it's a little bit too hard to see if you go to our website you can you can see the full version um but we're actively tracking in real time basically the progress that we're making towards mainnet um and uh it's been a long road but we are we are close we are close um we do intend to launch uh the Aztec no guarantees but you know this year these kinds of networks privacy networks you know I've been talking a lot about Aztec but you know we're not the only ones um you know there's Alo there's polygon miden there's penumbra like these networks are essential for making web 3 real you know um getting outside the synthetic bubble of tokens and casino games and really making blockchain what it was always supposed to be all along you know um a a weapon that we can wield to create information networks and transaction networks that focus on on individuals and benefiting individuals where individuals are the customers they're not the products where your data is kept with you client side and you only prove what you need to access products and services instead of having to surrender your data like you're being milked like some godamn cow on the information Super Highway um you know that's that's what I was set out to to build seven years ago um and uh we're close now we're close now and um yeah you know I I do I think that uh you're going to see a narrative shift when privacy networks become more mature when they're more practically used and deployed in real in the real world you're going to see now to shift away from this coins and casino kind of parlor games celebrity Mean coins just to again to the like the old school values of ethereum you know when I was at this Hacker House that Aztec La was was hosting two weeks ago it reminded me of my experience in web 3 in 2017 going to hacker houses going to hackathons where you know the people there were working on like cool stuff you know they were working on you know real world Payment Solutions they working on like insurance they were working on Supply Chain Solutions they were working on um like genuine like dbanks they were working on things that were important um but at the time right the technology wasn't there and none of these things could manifest but this time we have we have people building the same things but this time they're they're creating actual like Demos in our Hacker House with where things are working into to end you know like the technology is here now um to do what what we we were trying to all do in 2017 um and that really gives me a lot of hope uh it gives me a lot of confidence in the future despite the uh the the rather strange times we're living in today um so yeah that's basically that's what I wanted to talk about I think privacy will be the game changer of 2025 thank you very much [Music]