Zac Williamson - The Next Renaissance - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hello, good afternoon everybody. Uh my name is Zachary Williamson. I am the CEO and co-founder of Aztec Labs. We are a privacy first um programmable layer 2 for Ethereum. Um effectively we've been working for eight years now um with a singular mission of recreating uh the smart contract ecosystem of Ethereum but one where you have private information on chain uh and you can transact over private data and I'm here to talk about uh why privacy matters why this technology matters what the future the imminent future of blockchain is going to look like and how embracing privacy technology is going to lead to an explosion of liquidity on chain.

So I want to present a new framework, a new cannon for why web 3 is going to become so valuable in the future because it's a very simple equation. When you have private information on chain uh where that data is encrypted, your ledger is encrypted and every single transactions are effectively using zero knowledge proofs to manipulate that encrypted data. You get the best of all worlds. You get the strong guarantees of decentralization, but you also don't have this enforced transparency where everything is visible on chain. And if you have these properties, what that enables is identity.

Instead of just being a string of letters and characters on chain, you can now be a an individual. I can be I can prove on a network like Aztec that my name is Zachary Williamson. I'm 37 years old. I live in the United Kingdom. And I'm proving this not to individuals but to smart contracts.

And with identity, you can now meaningfully own assets on chain. Your assets don't need to be to your assets don't need to uh be purely synthetic. They can be representations of real world assets where you have non-custodial wallets onchain that can own and trade and transact with these assets because uh onchain protocols, smart contracts can perform the required compliance checks and regulatory checks to understand that yes, you are allowed to trade this asset. You're allowed to hold it. And what this does is it unlocks effectively DeFi but for assets sourced in the real world.

And I'm going to explain in the next 10 minutes why I think this is going to be so revolutionary. But before I do, just a quick segue into what the asset network is. So it's fully permissionless, fully decentralized as a layer 2 on Ethereum. It functions like a blockchain network using Ethereum for consensus. And we have smart contracts, but they're private.

This is why we are calling Aztec the first feature complete blockchain in the world. Because with Aztec, you can meaningfully link what happens in a smart contract with what happens in the real world in web 2. No longer are you limited by purely synthetic assets and instruments, but you can have meaningful information on chain. Now, we've been building this for eight years. Well, six to eight depending on how you count it.

Uh our test net's live fully decentralized. uh um people are building apps on it actively as I speak and we are aiming to launch the full network early next year. I want to pose a question to you all. Has blockchain met its original ambitions and aspirations of its creators of people like Satoshi Nakamoto, people like Vitalic Berin? And I would argue that whilst blockchain is extraordinarily valuable, whilst it's very useful, whilst it's a powerful technology, it has nevertheless failed to meet the aspirations of its inventors.

Bitcoin was not designed to be digital gold. It was designed to be a payments vehicle, a payments mechanism uh where a digital currency could compete and contest with fiat issued by sovereign states. Ethereum was designed to enable decentralized banks. It was designed to enable financial products and services that we take for granted in the real world um but in a much more permissionless environment. And again, we've largely seen that fail.

We don't have decentralized banks. We do have stable coins and we do have stable coin payments which is important but it's not the full picture. And I pose a question to you. Why is this the case? Why is blockchain failed to break out of its web bubble and become global payment infrastructure, global financial infrastructure that everybody uses.

And I would argue that the key reason is a lack of privacy. Everything that happens on blockchains like Bitcoin, it's fully public, which means you can't put your real world identity on on that network. Um, and without that, smart contracts, blockchain protocols, they can't perform the logical checks and guarantees and and uh that they need to determine if you are allowed to hold or trade an asset that is sourced from the real world that that exists within a a legal a regulatory jurisdiction on this planet. But with privacy technology, you can do that all. And that's what makes me excited.

And I'm going to explain now why this is valuable. This is not just a synthetically interesting topic. This is not just an academically interesting topic. And I'll explain why. Where does all the value on blockchain come from?

All the money that is that is used in this industry that is used to create these incredible conferences like token 2049, it only comes from two sources. There's dollarbacked stable coins and there's the native value of economic consensus on a blockchain. The consensus token. How much are people willing to pay in Bitcoin or Ethereum or Salana to get a trustless record of events? To give an example of why this is the case, imagine if the price of Ethereum went to zero tomorrow.

We all know the price, the value of every single token on Ethereum would also go to zero with the exception of dollar back stable coins. I'm going to posit this to you. This liquidity universe from these two sources, it's tiny relative to existing capital markets. The AUM of BlackRock, for example, is substantially higher than the total value lots on the Ethereum network. And that's just one company.

without being able to reach into the real world, without being able to tap real world assets on chain and make them liquid, use them as a source of liquidity for DeFi and other financial products and services, the growth ceiling for crypto is fatally kept because we only have these two value sources. That needs to change and privacy is going to change it. So this is why I said the new cannon exists with identity. You have non-custodial accounts where I can prove who I am or it could be an entity. It doesn't need to be a person.

It could be an organization. It could be a DAO, but where you have checks and balances and and some kind of logical conditions that give smart contracts an ability to understand who you are. For example, I could prove um I possess a Coinbase account and I've gone through Coinbase KYC. Or I could use something like ZK passport uh to create a uh zero knowledge proof of my passport to prove I'm a UK citizen. And then I can use that in DeFi as a as a compliance tool.

And identity, well, it enables ownership. Now I want to be able to own something in the real world based uh like where every transaction happens on chain. The issuance, the trading, the settlements. This is a this is really in Aztec's DNA because what we started out doing in 2017 was not uh privacy tech. uh me and my my co-founder we were trying to make a build a traditional financial product on chain serving existing capital markets serving mid-market debt um but we needed privacy to do that um and now we're doing it uh we made privacy and now companies web three companies are using the technology we've built for that original use case that we were trying to do in 2017 we have we have companies trying building mid-market debt products using our technology And finally, we can get to um self-s sovereign ownership, non-custodial wallets holding real world assets.

For this to happen, privacy must become a core value of blockchain. It not can't just be an Aztec specific thing. We're just going to be one of the first. Once you have real world assets on chain and you can put them into DeFi protocols, that's the important thing. Right now, you do have real world assets on chain, but they are too abstract.

to to hold these assets, you need to go through third party information brokers, information custodians, because you can't really hold a bond or a mortgage uh or a syndicated loan on chain. Um what's happening is that somebody else is owning it and they're just giving you some digital proxy, but that proxy is not tradable. You can't put it into a into a decentralized exchange because not everybody can hold that asset. But if you can perform compliance checks, regulatory checks within a smart contract framework, then you can create an equivalent of unis swap for real world assets uh and you associated D5 primitives and then that unlocks these assets as a source of liquidity and that turns the the the the liquidity amount of liquidity available, you know, it stops being measured in the billions and it starts being measured in the trillions. So how are we going to do this all?

How are we going to pull blockchain into the mainstream? make it global financial infrastructure. The first thing we need to do is we need to interface with web two systems. We need to be able to get information from web 2 into smart contracts into web 3 trustlessly using technologies like ZKTLS to get information from web servers into smart contracts. Uh using technologies like ZK email to get information from emails to smart contracts.

For example, um I can use the technology that we're building to prove that I have an email from His Majesty's Revenue and Collection Services uh complaining about my uh late tax filing uh which will which proves I'm a UK taxpayer. Um, and you can put that in a smart contract and then that smart contract can issue a credential based off of this proof saying, "Yes, okay, this person is probably a UK taxpayer." And then you can use that credential in other products and services built on chain in a composable manner creating this um a form of holistic identity where instead of your identity being defined by one centralized source it's be it's being drawn from a large number of disparate sources where companies can build products on Aztec where they create identity solutions that they need for their specific products but in doing so they issue a digital credential that can be used by other products and services which can then be used to create meta credentials effectively allowing an understanding of who you are and what you do to be sourced from a very large cast of actors which I think is a lot more secure and much scale more scalable than the existing system where if I want to KYC myself to do something in the in the real world some some financial transaction you know I've got to go through some process that and then if I want to do another if I need to go through some other like regulated transaction I had to do that KYC process all over again because data trust with privacy with composable smart contracts you can change that all uh and and create a a genuinely portable uh system for identity and then the final technique is to uh establish digital sovereignty. Once you have these systems, these protocols existing on chain, you can prove you can you can create precedent that owning a digital asset um represents a claim to property in the real world. And once that's established, the world will change.

So the ingredients to unlock blockchain are a zero knowledge programming language noir that we've built. Uh it's very high level. It abstracts away all the cryptography. Any dev on blockchain can build with no and create private programs. And then we have the Aztec network that which is a effectively an execution environment for noir where we have an encrypted state ledger encrypted blockchain which understands privacy understands private transactions which when you combine with noir means you can have I can call a smart contract that is private that calls another private smart contract that somebody else wrote that calls another private smart contract that somebody else wrote.

um effectively enabling the the uh the um uh the the the force multipliers of blockchain. And then finally, you need state-of-the-art cryptography to tie it all together, which is something that we excel at. Um uh our tech the cryptography we've invented powers a lot of a lot of blockchain protocols today. What I'm talking about is not science fiction. It's science fact.

The Aztec technology stack is being used in the real world today. You can you can download an app on the app store ZK passport that uses our tech which allows you to trustlessly get proofs um of of your of your citizenship of your age of your name without revealing any any additional information. We have bank grade private security tokens. We have anonymous social media. This is just the start.

This is the this is the start of of the storm that is to come where we're going to be creating the seeds for real decentralized banking fulfilling the real original vision of blockchain from all those years ago. Finally in 2026 creating for the first time the world's first feature complete blockchain. Thank you very much.