Aztec’s Privacy Rollup Hits Testnet Amid Growing Demand
Aztec, a layer-2 rollup centered on privateness, shared Thursday that its testnet has lastly gone reside.
The announcement comes as a wave of recent privacy-focused options begins to seize the pursuits of huge establishments that want confidentiality with massive transaction batches.
The staff behind Aztec mentioned that they’ve been engaged on the product for over 8 years, bringing the cutting-edge expertise one step nearer to the mainnet.
Aztec differs from different zero-knowledge rollups as a result of it’s centered on serving to functions and customers protect their non-public particulars by incorporating encryption on the protocol degree.
“All the secret data that you simply need to maintain encrypted, it is posted on our blockchain in an encrypted kind,” mentioned Zac Williamson, the co-founder of the Aztec Community, to CoinDesk.
Layer-2 networks have appeared en masse within the Ethereum area over the previous few years, and are seen as a sooner and cheaper different to transacting on the Ethereum protocol. However Aztec must quit parts of that with a purpose to protect its mission of being privacy-preserving in addition to decentralized.
“A totally non-public transaction may have extra knowledge related to it, as a result of all the things is encrypted. Which implies that you have required extra assets, subsequently you can not scale as a lot,” Williamson mentioned. “And so we’re effective with that. Aztec’s distinctive worth proposition is just not scaling. We do some little bit of that, [because] we’re a layer 2, however we by no means should be as low-cost as different layer 2s.”
Establishments have lengthy sought privacy-preserving instruments since they’re key to dealing with delicate transaction knowledge for public ledgers. Aztec raised $100 million in a sequence B in 2022, led by Paradigm, when conversations round blockchain privateness began to take off.
Not too long ago, privacy-preserving instruments are re-emerging as key to the trade as massive establishments start to return on-chain. On Tuesday, privateness answer Miden mentioned it had raised $25 million in seed fundingfrom a16z.
Learn extra: DeFi Privateness Bridge Aztec Join Sunsets After Much less Than a 12 months
