Aztec Interview: The closure of Connect is a commercial consideration and is continuing to build the L2 privacy protocol Noir

Aztec Interview: Connect closure not regulatory Pressure, Will Continue to build L2 Rollup

Original author: Zhixiong Pan

As Aztec Connect (zk.money) early adopters, after learning that the project was shutting down and focusing on Noir and the next generation of blockchainnoticeAfter that, I quickly contacted Aztec.Zac Williamson"To find out something that was not known outside of the announcement.

In particular, there has been some discussion in the community, such as:

• 是否面临监管压力？（另一个隐私混币协议 Tornado.Cash 被美国监管部门全方位干预）

• 运行 Aztec Connect 成本过高？

• 转向开发 Layer1？

And so on.

As a brief introduction, Aztec is the first Layer 2 (Rollup) network on Ethereum with privacy features. Aztec networks have lower transaction costs (due to the use of Rollup) compared to L1 hybrid privacy protocols such as Tornado.Cash.

Users can top up Ethereum Layer1 assets to the Aztec Connect network (Layer2), where they can then make private transfers, or invest their assets in the supported DeFi protocol for additional revenue.

TL; DR:

1. Aztec has not been contacted by the regulatory authorities and closing Aztec Connect is a commercial consideration;

2. The maintenance cost of Aztec Connect is high;

3. The team is focusing on Noir, a programmable smart contract protocol that defaults to privacy in the next generation;

4. Still focus on Layer2, not Layer1;

5. Noir uses Bitcoin-style UTXO model;

6. Noir will abstract away zero-knowledge proof and cryptography. Application developers do not need to know cryptography to develop Noir smart contracts.

The following are details of the questions and answers.

Were there any regulatory challenges before Aztec Connect shut down?

Zac Williamson:

We have not been contacted by any regulatory authorities, mainly because of commercial considerations.

Aztec Connect, the world's first privacy Rollup, has some design issues that increase maintenance costs.

We are focusing on our next generation version of the protocol. It will support fully programmed smart contracts that default to privacy. Given the scale of the project, we needed all the engineering resources we could muster.

All of our technologies are open source by default. We're very proud of bringing Aztec Connect into the world, and we want to make sure the community can still access what we've built.

You mentioned in your blog that you will develop the next generation of blockchain? Is this Layer1?

Zac Williamson:

We have not been contacted by any regulatory authorities, mainly because of commercial considerations.

Aztec Connect, the world's first privacy Rollup, has some design issues that increase maintenance costs.

We are focusing on our next generation version of the protocol. It will support fully programmed smart contracts that default to privacy. Given the scale of the project, we needed all the engineering resources we could muster.

All of our technologies are open source by default. We're very proud of bringing Aztec Connect into the world, and we want to make sure the community can still access what we've built.

What are the characteristics of Noir?

Zac Williamson:

Private smart contracts are very different from regular smart contracts and have very different development heuristics.

Since the proof of transaction is generated by the client (rather than the calculated cost paid by gas), the calculation no longer has a gas cost. private state uses the Bitcoin-style UTXO model, and state has the concept of "ownership."

Noir's main goal is to provide a language that explicitly expresses these trade-offs in the semantics of that language. We also wanted to create an intuitive model to better handle the differences between private and public states.

Most importantly, we want to abstract away all cryptography related to zero-knowledge proofs and ZK SNARKs with Noir. Developers do not need to know cryptography to write Noir contracts.

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