Aztec Labs has acquired Obsidion, the team behind @ZKPassport. The Obsidion team will continue to develop ZKPassport while also leading new consumer product developments. The ZKPassport protocol will remain open source.

we continue to advocate for common-sense regulation that protects developers of open-source software.

@AztecLabs_ is proud to stand with more than 60 industry CEOs and founders urging Senate leaders to pass the Clarity Act with developer protections and the BRCA intact. At Aztec Labs, we know what it takes to build noncontrolling noncustodial software and the risks developers face. The BRCA is a narrow, commonsense clarification: a developer who does not control user funds is not a money transmitter. The BRCA is needed more than ever. The time is now.

See 2024 UK CBDC Paper: aztec.network/blog/privacy-f… See 2026 UK Stablecoin Paper: x.com/punk6052/status/202115…

On 22 May 2026, @AztecLabs_ submitted a response to the UK government's consultation on children's online safety. I'll be direct about where we stand. We are sceptical of mandatory age verification. The evidence that it works is mixed, and the surveillance infrastructure built in the name of child safety rarely stays narrowly scoped. We said so plainly in the submission. But the consultation is happening, and if the government proceeds, the detail that matters most is how these systems are actually built. Every method deployed today related to online age verification either gets bypassed easily or forces users to hand a document scan to a third-party server, which creates centralised databases of sensitive personal data. Those databases get breached often and easily, creating personal and national security risks. This is the predictable result of collecting far more than the question requires. So our submission, among other things, asks the government for three things: 1. make privacy by design a hard requirement rather than an aspiration; 2. recognise device-level proofs within the existing trust framework; and 3. do not restrict VPNs, which serve real privacy and security purposes. The UK can set the global standard for how this is done, or it can attach a breachable identity database to every platform its citizens use. I think the choice is clear.

Aztec Labs responded to the UK Age Verification Consultation. Building age verification doesn't have to mean building a honeypot of everyone's data. The UK needs to avoid that dystopian future.

Read our full response to the UK online child safety consultation here here: aztec-labs.com/blog/age-veri…

watch the full ZKPassport flow in action

Verify users without holding their data. Here's the full flow 👇 they scan their ID, their phone reads the passport chip, checks the country's signature, and sends your backend a zero-knowledge proof. No PII, nothing to breach. 130 countries. One SDK, 6 lines.

Zcash has been through this before and will be just fine. decrypt.co/370105/zec-crashe… Hats off to the entire team here for formally verifying the next upgrade. Read some of my comments here.

This ruins the UX of stealth addresses, fluid key, privacy preserving sweeps to L2s and most interesting L1 create2 use cases. Increasing these costs places a tax on privacy. So much for CROp̶S.

we agree.

encouraging to see obsidian working with a capitalized team like @AztecLabs_ now! Perhaps these sort of combinations can enable more work being funded to get it to hit consumer scale.

this is probably the cleanest way to explain private identity: prove the passport fact, not hand over the passport