Benjamin Williamson

🚨Less than one hour left to apply!!🚨 £300 for a weekend, wonderful music making, 12 mins from London! Don’t miss out! stalbanscathedral.org/lay-clerk

What does privacy mean to you?

Singing BWV40 with Rudolf Lutz & Bach Stiftung tonight in St. Gallen. Delighted to be sharing the stage with fellow Kingsman Charles Daniels! @ChoirOfKingsCam @ConnaughtArtis1 Check out the local library!

Pretty proud of singing this epic piece yesterday!

Crypto has memes, markets, and mania, but almost no memory. So I wrote our missing memory. This is The Blockchain Canon: the ideas that built us, the myths that divide us, and the primitives that, one day, may reunite us. Remember where we came from.

Launching the first decentralized L2 on Ethereum, isn't easy, but we did it. - 582 validators are live on the network - 5k+ blocks produced - 25+ countries across 5 continents It's been less than a week. ignition.aztec.network

@afrazhaowang @RyanSAdams @aztecnetwork @Zac_Aztec @jaosef @TrustlessState @Bankless 💯

@RyanSAdams @aztecnetwork @Zac_Aztec @jaosef @TrustlessState @Bankless @Zac_Aztec

i was doing @aztecnetwork research and i found this podcast @Zac_Aztec and @jaosef looking like toddlers with baby face @TrustlessState it's really been 5 years hasn't it come on @bankless and let's run this back for the nostalgia?

so proud of @Zac_Aztec and the @aztecnetwork team. they’ve built this with long-term conviction, real cryptographic excellence, and a kind of integrity that’s rare in this space. it’s a team with wisdom and the right values.

Privacy will eat the world (1/🧵)

The $AZTEC token sale has been live for 2 days. There’s been real excitement, and also some questions we want to clarify around Contributor whitelist benefits, token lockups, and governance. We’ve simplified the FAQ on the official site 👇sale.aztec.network 🧵

The Information Age made us products. The Privacy Age will make us human again. @Zac_Aztec on what it means to have dignity online, and why the privacy renaissance starts with Aztec.

THIS IS A MUST READ. KILL THE ATTENTION ECONOMY AND RESTORE HUMAN DIGNITY!

my new essay “The China Tech Canon” is out in @asteriskmgzn's 12th issue, themed “Book.” link in reply. in this piece, i trace the intellectual map of china’s tech founders by asking a simple question: what books have shaped their worldview? what emerged is that the “china tech canon” shares deep roots with the “silicon valley canon” that @patrickc and @Scholars_Stage once outlined—works by paul graham, jim collins, peter thiel, and biographies of elon musk (and many others) circulate widely. but the chinese canon also branches into its own distinct traditions: what i call the red canon, the grey canon, and the fanstasy canon. alongside the western playbook of disruption and ambition, chinese entrepreneurs also draw from maoist texts, confucian ethics, martial-arts fantasies, and liu cixin's ruthless universe. i’ve loved @asteriskmgzn for a long time, and it was a joy to become friends with the founder+editor @clarabcollier during our china trip in august that @jasminewsun organized, and to work with her on this piece. many thanks to @jkeatn and @clarabcollier's wonderful editing. also thanks to @danwwang @Scholars_Stage and @Zac_Aztec for their feedback. @danwwang asked a few great follow-up questions that i might later expand into a sequel on my substack, Concurrent.

Blockchain began with a clear philosophy. You could call it cypherpunk, you could call it all cyberpunk, but at it's core, Bitcoin was about replacing money. The vision was utopian in nature, but also somewhat anachronistic, the worldview of early blockchain pioneers wasn’t an iteration of the status quo, but a fundamental rejection of it. Fast forward to today, and there’s a growing cynicism within the Web3 space. Many of the early pioneers either got rich and left, or burned out. The broader community has lost faith that this tech can still drive cultural change and truly reshape the world the way it once promised to. The industry today is more interested in courting institutions and adapting products to fit their existing framework, as opposed to contesting these institutions and encouraging startups to use this technology to disrupt and replace old frameworks with a radical decentralized alternative. Those original canons haven’t lost their relevance, they’ve just been left unfinished. The next phase of this industry depends on rediscovering the early convictions of self-sovereignty, decentralization, and censorship resistance.

This is the culmination of 8 years of work. Back in 2017 I wanted to build products that connected blockchains with the real world. I was constantly frustrated by the inability to securely analyse sensitive information on-chain. If you want a job done properly you do it yourself, I guess. Today you can see and use the fruits of our labor. It has not been easy. The technology to execute on our goals did not exist in 2017 and we had to quite literally invent it. In my personal journey as a co-founder, I had to become a world expert in zero-knowledge cryptography and publish multiple original research papers like Plonk in order to get Aztec to where it is today. Forget software, we had to start with raw mathematics, perform R&D to convert into peer-reviewed papers and *then* build the software. It has been an incredible team effort. Aztec is over 70 people now, we’ve only reached today because of the persistent and dedicated effort of what I consider to be by far and away the most talented and committed team in web3. Anything less and, given the scope of our ambitions, we would have failed. The number of challenges we’ve had to overcome to get to today could fill a hundred tweet threads. I fell in love with a vision of what blockchains could become. It hurts to see how far reality has fallen from the dream. Were we not supposed to be banking the un-banked? Or help regular people participate openly in the governance structures of institutions they depend on? Were we not supposed to break open the world of finance and rip it out of the hands of economic elites and distribute that control to the people? I never let go of the dream. My friends and colleagues never let go. Aztec’s existence is testament to our faith. Testnet is just one step along a journey that is far from concluded. The goal is not to make Aztec exist, the goal is to make it useful. I’m looking forward to working with all of you to make that a reality.

Aztec’s Public Testnet is live. The privacy revolution is finally here.

It’s alive! Hahahahhaha. This is the result of protracted, incredible effort by incredible people. I am so proud of my colleagues at @aztecnetwork , they are the best in the world.

my morning routine to stay cracked 💪🧠

Privacy isn’t just a principle—it’s something we build for. @Zac_Aztec shares how @NoirLang gives individuals the tools to prove statements about hidden info, challenge the predatory design of online spaces, and put data control back in users’ hands. youtube.com/watch?v=Rkl-Xb…