Financing $119 million, how does Aztec reconstruct privacy on Ethereum? How does the public testnet interact?
Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News
In the development process of blockchain technology, the contradiction between privacy protection and transparency has always been a focus of industry attention. Ethereum, with its strong decentralization and verifiability, has built a foundation of trust, but the mechanism of completely public transaction data exposes user privacy to all-encompassing monitoring.
Against this backdrop, the emergence of the Aztec privacy network brings new possibilities for resolving this contradiction. On May 1, 2025, Aztec officially launched its public testnet and opened permissions to developers for the first time, meaning that developers can build applications with complete privacy protection capabilities based on the Ethereum ecosystem.
As a privacy Layer 2 solution in the Ethereum ecosystem, Aztec utilizes zero-knowledge proof technology to provide users and DApps with programmable privacy protection solutions and low-cost transaction processing. This article will introduce the project from several dimensions, including project overview, core team and financing history, project development context, and interaction operation guide.
What is the background of Aztec?
Aztec was developed by Aztec Labs, founded in 2017. Aztec Labs operates in a fully remote work model, and the official website currently lists 67 team members. Some of the core leadership are as follows:
- Co-founder and CEO Zac Williamson: Co-inventor of the zero-knowledge proof system PLONK, holds a PhD in particle physics from the University of Oxford.
- Co-founder and President Joe Andrews: EF9 Cohort member, holds a bachelor's degree in materials science from Imperial College London, and previously served as CTO of Silicon Valley food tech company Radish.
- Co-founder Tom Walton Pocock: Formerly served as Aztec CEO, currently not listed among Aztec's official team members.
- CTO Charlie Lye: Holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Heriot-Watt University, with 20 years of experience. Previously served as Chief Engineer at Triptease, C++ Engineer at Bloomberg, and C++ Engineer at BetFair.
- COO Lisa Cuesta Bunin: MBA from Harvard University, Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Formerly led NextGen Venture Partners, which has been acquired by Brown Advisory.
- CMO Claire Kart: Previously worked at RISC Zero, Mina Foundation (founder), O(1) Labs, Ripple, SoFi, and other companies.
- CFO Scott Siversen: Former CFO of ShapeShift.
In terms of financing, Aztec has attracted the favor of numerous investors, with a total financing amount exceeding $119 million.
In November 2018, Aztec completed a $2.1 million seed round of financing, led by Consensys Labs.
In December 2021, Aztec completed a $17 million Series A financing, led by Paradigm, with participation from a_capital, Ethereal Ventures, Libertus Capital, Variant Fund, Nascent, IMToken, Scalar Capital, Defi Alliance, IOSG Ventures, and ZK Validator, with angel investors including Anthony Sassano, Stani Kulechov, Bankless, Defi Dad, Mariano Conti, and Vitalik Buterin.
In December 2022, Aztec completed a $100 million Series B financing, led by a16z crypto, with participation from A Capital, King River, Variant, SV Angel, Hash Key, Fenbushi, and AVG.
What is Aztec?
Aztec is a privacy-centric Ethereum L2 scaling network dedicated to achieving user privacy on Ethereum while supporting programmable smart contracts.
So how does Aztec enhance privacy? Aztec encodes additional checks in the zk-SNARK circuit of zk-Rollup, introducing the concepts of private state and private functions, fundamentally ensuring the privacy and security of each transaction.
Specifically, Aztec adopts a model where private functions and public functions work in coordination. Private functions are executed on the user's local device, protecting privacy and generating proofs; public functions are executed by sorters on Aztec's own virtual machine (AVM), operating on public states that everyone can see. A transaction can simultaneously include calls to both private and public functions, strictly following the order of executing private functions locally first, then executing public functions on the AVM.
It is worth mentioning that due to Aztec's privacy mechanism heavily relying on the client generating proofs and encrypting data locally, and being incompatible with the EVM architecture, it is not EVM compatible. Additionally, Aztec has created a new virtual machine—AVM (Aztec Virtual Machine). AVM contracts are written in Noir (designed for zero-knowledge applications and privacy contracts), compiled into ZK circuits, with each function being a ZK SNARK verification key.
In terms of state models, Aztec adopts a mixed model of private and public states. Public states are stored and updated by sorters, who execute state transitions, generate proofs of correct execution (or delegate proof generation to a proving network), and publish relevant data to Ethereum.
Private states are stored in the form of UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Outputs, referred to as Notes by Aztec), which can only be decrypted by the holder. The hash values of Notes are stored in a Merkle tree (note hash tree), and when you "spend" a note, Aztec marks the original note's commitment as "nullified" and creates a new note assigned to a new owner, achieving a cash-like change effect. External observers cannot trace the flow of funds.
According to Aztec's example, Notes are similar to cash but slightly different. In real life, when you want to spend $3.50, you would hand a $5 bill to the cashier, who keeps $3.50 and gives you $1.50 in change. When using private notes on Aztec, if you want to spend a $5 note, you would nullify it and create a $1.50 note (held by you) and a $3.50 bill (held by the recipient). Only you and the recipient know about this $3.50 transaction; they do not know that you "split" the $5 bill.
Aztec's development context and milestones
Aztec Labs' initial goal was to build an on-chain debt platform called CreditMint. However, the team later realized through practice that public blockchains lacking privacy protection could not widely gain user trust, prompting Aztec to decisively shift towards privacy technology development.
In 2019, the Aztec team released the zero-knowledge proof system PLONK, significantly reducing the costs of proof generation and verification.
In 2021 and 2022, Aztec successively launched zk.money and Aztec Connect (Ethereum privacy DeFi solution Aztec Connect).
At the end of 2022, Aztec released the open-source zero-knowledge programming language Noir (based on Rust), simplifying the development of privacy smart contracts and lowering the entry barrier for developers.
In 2023, Aztec strategically adjusted to discontinue zk.money and Aztec Connect, fully transitioning to a completely decentralized ZK Rollup, focusing on the Noir language and next-generation cryptographic blockchain development.
In February 2025, Aztec launched the Aztec Foundation, which will conduct foundational research in the field of enhanced freedom in cryptography, as well as provide support to developers to help them create innovative applications, protect user privacy, ensure compliance, and maintain the universal language of zero-knowledge proofs, Noir.
On May 1, 2025, Aztec launched the Aztec public testnet, aimed at rigorously testing decentralization in sorting, proof, and governance before the mainnet launch.
Aztec Public Testnet
Aztec is committed to becoming a fully decentralized, permissionless, and privacy-focused Layer 2 network on Ethereum. The Aztec public testnet is a platform for developers, node operators, and ordinary users to explore privacy blockchain together, testing around the following three decentralization requirements: decentralized sorting, decentralized proof, and decentralized governance mechanisms.
In terms of decentralized sorting, anyone can run a sorter node, participate in transaction sorting, block proposal, and verify blocks generated by other sorting nodes. The sorting network adopts a PoS mechanism similar to Ethereum, but block verification is completed by 48 randomly selected sequencers, with two-thirds of the validations required to confirm a block, achieving fast pre-confirmation while ensuring the security of final settlement through Ethereum.
In terms of decentralized proof, provers generate cryptographic proofs to verify the correctness of public transactions, ultimately forming a Rollup proof submitted to Ethereum. The proof client developed by Aztec Labs consists of three components: proof nodes identify unproven periods (a collection of 32 blocks) and create separate proof jobs; proving brokers add these proof job requests to a queue and assign them to idle proving agents; proving agents compute the actual proofs. Once the proof computation is completed, the proof nodes send the proofs to L1 for verification. The Aztec network distributes proof rewards to all users who submit proofs on time, thereby reducing the risk of centralization dominated by entities with significant computational power.
How to participate?
1. For developers: Log in to the developer login page (https://aztec.network/developers) to customize and deploy contracts using public and private components.
2. For node operators:
Sorter nodes can participate using ordinary consumer-grade hardware. (Click here for the running guide.)
Prover nodes require higher computational power to participate in generating zero-knowledge proofs. Click here for the running guide (according to Aztec's official information, running a prover node has higher hardware requirements than running a sequencer node, requiring about 40 machines, each expected to be equipped with 16 cores and 128GB of memory).
It is important to emphasize that due to the potentially high costs of running provers, and since the costs incurred on the testnet and mainnet are the same, Aztec's public testnet limits transaction speed to 0.2 transactions per second (TPS).
Of course, Aztec also emphasizes, "No airdrops, no marketing gimmicks. We just want to create a community of highly skilled operators." However, Aztec states that running a node can earn a Discord role.
3. For ordinary users:
Interact with the Aztec ecosystem:
Cross-chain on Human Tech: Transfer Ethereum testnet tokens across chains;
Exchange on NEMI (currently requires access code);
Interact on the Raven House NFT marketplace.
Reference: https://aztec.network/blog/what-is-aztec-testnet
https://docs.aztec.network/
https://aztec.network/blog/a-new-era-for-web3-introducing-aztec-public-testnet
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