jaosef.eth

Ship a network that is built to last. Decentralised from day 1 — controlled by the community. Aztec's community launched the Ignition chain of Aztec on Ethereum main-net at 1am last night. The future is here and it is private.

Build in bear markets

This week on Aztec: new apps, new tooling, network growth, and governance live. Here's the recap.

@NeerajKA Hold the line.

I’m collecting a list of crypto policy advocates that are drawing a hard line on not weakening the BRCA. If that’s you, reply to this thread.

Aztec Labs CEO @jaosef on the UK Digital Identity bill: "The UK, with its Online Safety Act, is banning end-to-end encryption and throwing away our opportunity to lead." Read more on @Finextra: tinyurl.com/muy2ette

Privacy as it should be.

Privacy in crypto will win in two forms: 1. Private money — encrypted assets 2. Private computation — encrypted smart contracts The second category is especially important for institutions because each one of them has its own idiosyncratic requirements—bespoke business logic, compliance rules, etc. For them, providing privacy to their users isn’t as simple as just encrypting everything. They need to be able to encode who can see what and under which conditions. That means privacy cannot just be binary. It must be programmable.

4. Privacy is not the product. Privacy is a tool to enable amazing products. It’s the products privacy enables that matter. Aztec exists because of these realisations and many more.

3. Privacy must be powered by strong immutable cryptography guarantees, not the whim or opsec of an intermediary. Privacy must be, neutral, decentralised and open source.

It’s exciting to see so many teams realise privacy is important this year. We realised this 7 years ago. After you accept privacy is a pre- requisite, you then realise: 🧶

So I was on the phone chatting with my boss at Shielded Labs, @aquietinvestor, when I opened my snail mail saw this. "Oh shit!", I expostulated. I momentarily thought we were being investigated by the SEC again. 🙀 ⤵️

@blulinski @omw_to_the_moon @ethereum @aztecnetwork @lisacuesta All time high on txs since you joined. Not bad.

@omw_to_the_moon @ethereum @aztecnetwork @jaosef @lisacuesta congrats Rahul! always fun working with you. wish you all the best in your next chapter, my friend

I am pumped to announce that, as of April, I have been working at @ethereum foundation as the EVM Dev Tooling Lead. Bittersweetly, this does mark the end of my 3 (!!) years at @aztecnetwork. Thank you to @jaosef @lisacuesta and many others for the amazing memories, offsites and the massive learning opportunity, as I pivoted from engineering to product management. I am excited for what Labs will do post Alpha launch and serving as an example for privacy products in crypto. There is a lot in store there. In my new role at the EF, I hold myself accountable for making it easier to build EVM apps. I plan to tackle: 👉 Fixing top developer pain points and working with @HardhatHQ @solidity_lang, foundry, @etherscan, other SDKs, tooling and even all core devs. And yes, I have a list of the pain points. 👉 Ensuring tooling stays up to date with latest forks (glamsterdam, hegota etc) 👉 Working with the one and only @austingriffith and his team to ensure Claude code and other LLMs can build good, secure dapps (checkout ethskills.com btw!) 👉 Outlining broader language and tooling vision, funding strategies with appropriate teams, 👉 Sunsetting not needed tools or finding other maintainers. I have serving in this role for just about a month now and there is so much cooking. You will be hearing many fun announcements and big frustrations being solved over the next few weeks. Solidity devs - if you ever encounter any problem/frustration with any tooling - do reach out. My DMs remain open! To the X algorithm - help me be the point of contact for solidity devs! I want to know your biggest issues when building on Ethereum or L2s. PS: Is it cringe to say evm/acc?

@danrobinson @apriori0x This is very true. I fully commend the integrity of your docs especially compared to other similar solutions which are mute on the risks / tradeoffs our space faces.

Well, we put a lot of effort into not just the zones design but also how we described its properties in the blog post and docs, and we wanted to make sure nobody misunderstood the solution We felt those docs were indeed "describing it to a room full of cryptographers" and that they described the solution and its tradeoffs clearly And most people, including you, seem to understand it well, and you aren't pointing to anything misleading in the docs. So I think it's reasonable for you to criticize the trust assumptions of the model, but not to say we're lying about the properties

goal posts shift to benefit business. it's rational of course. and major props to the team for shipping like none other in the industry. but this is a pattern and a notable example. take note.

aztec bible dropped. 5 hours of @aztecnetwork content is insane. weekend sorted.

Decentralised sequencing took a lot of effort from the RFP design phase to building and shipping. It forced us to design things the correct way from day 1. It has the side effect of moving some training wheels to the app level but IMO this is a good thing as its much easier for an app to decide what training wheels need to exist for its usecase. Great analysis and article.

@guywuolletjr @DAnconia_Crypto I think part of the reason is historical many investors have also abstained from votes due to securities considerations so that leads to bad voting / decision making.

@DAnconia_Crypto nope, i do not mean that it would be crazy, but if external service providers do a bad job, then the protocol could employ full time contributors to do a better job

it's insane to me that buy and burn has become the default for profitable crypto protocols why would a high growth startup would ever take its profits and distribute them to shareholders instead of re-investing for future growth, or at least holding it for runway

@danrobinson Its not a one size fits all approach. The network should not pick how much to dial it back, an application can do that. The privacy needs of a voting system are very different from a centrally issued stable coin that is GENIUS compliant.

@jaosef If you're going to dial it back anyway, does it make sense to boil the technological ocean to get the total version? Why not build a solution that fits the privacy model you are aiming for?

Privacy via intermediaries is not real privacy.

@danrobinson Total privacy is pretty useless IMO. The key point is its programmable. A protocol needs to start with total privacy to give users any meaningful guarantees. App builders can then dial back the privacy to meet any regulatory use-case.

It's definitely not total privacy

Big improvements for writing private smart contracts shipped. 🚢