Aztec Protocol Will Probably Produce Better Ethereum Privacy

Aztec Protocol, which is a smart contract backed privacy solution for Ethereum, officially kicked off the 30-day “Ignition Ceremony” which is a trusted setup process that will successfully underpin the AZTEC privacy features if even one of the effort’s 260-plus participants partakes in the ceremony honestly.

Launched on October 25th, the Ignition event now puts AZTEC on course for becoming the inaugural privacy network activated on Ethereum.

The project’s chief executive officer Thomas Pocock was in the Ethereum news last month and said that the randomization ceremony can be generally likened to the shuffling of playing cards.

“A good analogy is a group of people shuffling a deck of cards. Each person shuffles the deck (in AZTEC’s ceremony, that’s the process of adding randomness into the transcript), and then hands on the pack to the next participant,” he said.

Once the “shuffling” is finished in about a month, the ensuing randomness will support the zero-knowledge proofs known as zk-SNARKs. The Ethereum Aztec Protocol is very much awaited by the community. In a way, it is as anticipated as the Zcash privacy coin project which was completed last year.

Watch the @aztecprotocol ceremony getting underway. People around the world are contributing computation to help kick off the network.https://t.co/ptrgeF25gQpic.twitter.com/ZzsiYHrspe

— Richard Burton (@ricburton) October 25, 2019

Once the Aztec Protocol and ACE is live, the system will allow users to make private Ethereum transactions in two distinct ways. One of them involves the direct creation of Aztec tokens that can be used anonymously – and the other one involves wrapping, which will entail using ACE to peg the private tokens to other assets like Ether (ETH) or ERC20 tokens.

The Aztec Protocol is in the cryptocurrency news now. As one AZTEC team member named Zachary Williamson noted recently in a paper, the new zk-SNARK construction requires only a single trusted setup which could work.

The creator and co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, explained the value of PLONKs last month and said:

“[I]nstead of there being one separate trusted setup for every program you want to prove things about, there is one single trusted setup for the whole scheme after which you can use the scheme with any program (up to some maximum size chosen when making the setup).”

His innovation – the Aztec Protocol – could be a major game changer in the cryptography ecosystem going forward. The AZTEC team helped make it a reality.