Zatoshi
@Zac_Aztec
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CEO @aztecnetwork. Building a privacy-first L2 on Ethereum. Cryptographer, software engineer, ex-particle physicist. Plonk co-author. Huff inventor.
Joined July 2018
I just got out of hospital. While I can somewhat function, life will never be the same. There is no cure. This is difficult but I need to share with you all how this happened. Stay indoors. Wear a mask. If you hear anyone say 'gud' or ramble about data privacy, RUN.
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absolutely astonishing that breaking these taboos -- endorsing British wealth and exceptionalism -- has such power partly why I think this fight is so winnable https://t.co/r6lXcVWplz
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The UK is a great country with an extraordinary history. Our stagnation is real, but it's fixable and worth fixing. Enjoyed giving this talk at @lfg_uk last week and so encouraged by the optimistic responses I've had from people who are building a brilliant future for Britain 🚀
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"Britain created the modern world. "This country gave us so much of what not only we, but the world, values today." @matthewclifford reminds us that Britain has an exceptional history - so we can have an exceptional future. 🚀🇬🇧🚀
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Today I was swarmed by EIGHT armed police officers who took me off the train for a "random" control. They literally entered the train as a group and went straight for me. They said I was being taken to their office to avoid the embarrassment of being searched on the platform,
I was debanked as a tech founder. I cannot open any bank account in the UK anymore. No explanation was given, just "here's a check, now leave". Worst yet I'm being harassed at airports. Detained for many hours, questioned and arbitrary restrictions created for me. I was told I'm
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Blockchains cannot reach their full potential without privacy. But, onchain financial privacy, like nuclear physics, is a powerful dual-use technology. I believe we need to build pragmatic privacy over idealized privacy: - Throttled privacy: proof-of-innocence / selective
9/14 - Wei Dai @_weidai (@1kxnetwork)— “The Privacy Trilemma.” Balancing usefulness, self‑sovereignty, and threat resistance on public chains. Watch: https://t.co/l0CcQz7Fv2 Jump to: • 00:00 Intro → https://t.co/z7rAibHyZo • 00:20 Why financial privacy matters →
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Britain is a great country, but unless we reignite growth, we can’t pay for any of our other goals. Was great to talk about this at @lfg_uk Make or Break this week👇
"Whatever you care about, whatever your vision for this country, it will be much easier to achieve it if we make the UK rich again." @matthewclifford at LFG: Make or Break 🚀
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BREAKING: Mamdani's odds collapse in NYC Mayoral Election. If he continues falling at the rate he has the past 24h, Cuomo would be the projected winner.
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I want to use this reminder to highlight a topic that got almost no attention despite all the talk about encrypted compute. Until we get iO, there’s a trade-off between privacy and liveness. Any system that wants private shared state without trusting a single operator or TEE
Regular reminder: A key property of a blockchain is that even a 51% attack *cannot make an invalid block valid*. This means even 51% of validators colluding (or hit by a software bug) cannot steal your assets. However, this property does not carry over if you start trusting
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6 years ago, when i first started working in zk, it was a tiny community of cryptographers and i understood nothing plus there were no resources to learn today, i read this and understood 80% of it go find the thing that literally melts your face and try to understand it
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You want my credentials? I’m one of the few people alive who has written more books than they’ve read. That’s founder energy right there.
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Shameless plug - every zkVM running in prod (except @RiscZero ) runs on ZK tech built by our team at Polygon Zero - including @SuccinctLabs @openvm_org @brevis_zk etc. What’s more Ethereum-aligned than developing the ZK future of the entire protocol? Plonky2 and Plonky3 were
I really appreciate both @sandeepnailwal's personal contributions and @0xPolygon's immensely valuable role in the ethereum ecosystem. To recap: * Polygon hosts @Polymarket, which is probably the single most successful example of a "not just boring finance" app that has actually
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zkevms are built for scaling. 'zkzkevms' aims for private smart contract interactions. Still very limited though. And waiting for iO as proposed means another 5-10y of very little progress. We can do better. Already now. Private Shared State on coSNARKs & oblivious hashmaps ⬇️
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Barry my dude I love you and this is a great research topic, but you’ve gotta be joking if you think this is easy to implement. If you don’t want users to give decryption keys to zkEVM provers then you immediately fall into a complexity spiral that ends up producing something
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Yes, the goal of @paradigm and many other VCs is to suck as much value as possible from the Ethereum and broader ecosystem, while also adding value to the ecosystem in the service of maximizing their own gains. Paradigm is particular good at this. Subgoals include progressing the
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The rush of ppl building private transactions is great news for the industry, but there is still only one team doing private compute The Private World Computer stands alone on @aztecnetwork
Base is building private transactions. We acquired the Iron Fish team back in Mar 2025 to start working on this. More to share soon.
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Peer-to-peer money needs to resemble real-world, web2 transactions in order to be adopted. Until now, the best privacy blockchain could offer was either anonymity (hiding identity) or confidentiality (obfuscating transactions). Neither of those instills confidence in most people
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Noir isn’t a zkDSL anymore. It’s the only programmable cryptography language out there.
Want to build privacy-preserving apps but intimidated by MPC? Good news: if you know Circom or Noir, you can already start. Here’s how we’ve made ZK + MPC usable for devs 🧵👇
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Today's been a day and a half... get woken up by PagerDuty at 2AM. The Sepolia Fusaka upgrade has been fun. Have been hunched over my keyboard ever since... 15 hours straight minus a coffee run. Time to touch some grass 🪿🌲 and eat some tacos 🌮
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before the Solana foundation donated 500k before the EF stepped up to help Alexey publicly before Paradigm helped Roman Storm when it was still taboo to do it remember who was willing to stand with Roman & Alexey and say that developing privacy on Ethereum was not a crime ✌️
I remember conversations advising me that I was too close to Tornado Cash and that I should flee the US or else risk being arrested as well but I stayed and helped coordinate raising millions of dollars for the Alexey & Roman legal defense fight together, or die alone 🫡
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