Aztec

Aztec started in 2017 with CreditMint, an attempt to issue corporate debt onchain. The founders—Zac Williamson, Joe Andrews, Tom Pocock and Arnaud Schenk—ran into a basic obstacle: a public ledger exposed information that borrowers and financial institutions ordinarily keep private. A 2018 proof of concept for confidential DAI showed a different product direction, though it hid asset values rather than identities or arbitrary code.

Product limits pushed the research. Williamson, Ariel Gabizon and Oana Ciobotaru published PLONK in 2019, reducing the need to perform a new trusted setup for every circuit. Aztec then launched privacy contracts in 2020 and the zk.money rollup on March 15, 2021. In 2022, Connect let users reach Ethereum DeFi through a privacy rollup, turning the research into a service people could actually deposit into.

Connect’s weakness was organizational as much as cryptographic. Aztec operated the rollup instance and its sequencer. The team’s later history says zk.money and Connect reached more than $20 million in peak value, yet it concluded that decentralizing them would require major architectural change. On March 21, 2023 the operated instance stopped new deposits.

Withdrawals continued until March 31, 2024, when Aztec stopped its sequencer. The code remained open for someone else to run, but users were explicitly urged to exit. That year-long winding down separates the old product from today’s chain: the name and research continued, while the live service, state and operating arrangement did not.

The replacement stack puts private work in the Private Execution Environment on the user’s device. Keys and encrypted notes stay there while the client executes private functions and builds proofs. Any public portion moves to the Aztec Virtual Machine on network nodes; sequencers order it, provers finalize checkpoints, and Ethereum verifies the rollup result. A single contract can therefore combine concealed state with public effects.

That architecture is selective privacy, not invisibility. Aztec’s own guidance warns that public calls and their arguments are visible, unencrypted events and L2-to-L1 messages reveal data, and timing or transaction fingerprints can link behavior. Developers decide where the boundary sits. A poorly designed application can cross it and leak the very fact it meant to hide.

The rebuilt stack first appeared as a live devnet on August 13, 2024. Public testnet followed on May 1, 2025. Ignition began producing blocks on Ethereum mainnet in November 2025 before private smart-contract execution was enabled. After token-holder governance approved the next step, Alpha opened that execution environment on March 31, 2026.

Alpha V5 activated on July 21 with faster client proving and the first application set. Six days later, contributors found a critical flaw that could let an invalid state transition pass proof verification. The August 7 disclosure placed V5 funds, applications and contract state at risk, said chain history could not determine past exploitation, and directed the fix to V6. “Alpha” is therefore a precise status: real transactions and decentralized operators, alongside breaking upgrades, incomplete audit coverage and state that does not automatically migrate.

Aztec Foundation created 10.35 billion AZTEC on Ethereum. The allocation divided tokens among sale routes, grants, future incentives, first-year rewards, the Foundation, early backers and the team. Sequencers stake 200,000 AZTEC, while the current 400-token checkpoint reward is split 70% to the proposer and 30% to provers. Bridging AZTEC creates Fee Juice, which cannot itself be transferred and is spent on network execution.

The supply is bounded rather than permanently fixed. The verified ERC-20 lets its owner mint; that owner is CoinIssuer, which hard-codes a 20% nominal annual ceiling and is reached through a treasury controlled by governance. The reviewed supply remained 10.35 billion. Network upgrades likewise move through sequencer signaling and token voting before execution, making the newest registered rollup canonical. Those powers concern protocol parameters and deployments. The sale terms do not turn them into equity, revenue, intellectual property, repayment or a claim on Foundation assets.