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.

You are watching the next breakthrough in client side proving. 🫡

Here’s a new summary page for our sequencing research! Check it out now to see how different architectures compare and what you can expect in case of different kinds of censorship. Starting with @gnosis_, @aztecnetwork and @0xPolygon, you will find more projects there in the future.

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.

Oh right. Forgot to tell you: ✅ Schnorr signature over Grumpkin curve on @Ledger 👁️ Viewing key derive from Ledger's account, shared with app (it's per app viewing key) ✅ Signature key never leaves device You now can just build things, anon.

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.

Why even decentralise the sequencer? We just shipped some additions to the Sequencing sections of the projects that have decentralised sequencer setups to answer the question: if part of the sequencer set is censoring you, how long until your tx actually gets in? Live for @gnosischain, @aztecnetwork & @0xPolygon. 🧵

The "just shifting where the honeypots live" argument didn't sound quite right to me, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert, so I checked with someone who is — Joe Andrews (@jaosef), CEO of @AztecLabs_ — who said: "The key point is that with zero-knowledge-based identity primitives, you do the verification one time, against government-issued credentials, and after that, you should never have to hand that data off to anyone again. The State Department already issued the credential. It's sitting on an NFC chip in your passport, cryptographically signed. ZKPassport reads that chip locally, on your device, generates a proof of whatever attribute is required, and nothing else leaves the phone. There is no issuer in the middle retaining data. The data honeypots don't exist in this model because the underlying data is never aggregated in the first place. The idea that verifiable credentials create new data brokers is valid for verifiable credentials systems specifically, where an issuer has to mint and manage credentials, but solutions like ZKPassport sidestep that need entirely because the government already did the issuance years ago when they printed your passport. The compliance objection to this model keeps getting raised and keeps getting answered the same way: a cryptographic proof of sanctions status or age or nationality is more tamper-resistant than a KYC database. It satisfies the underlying regulatory requirement. The question now is whether regulators acknowledge that, and we're seeing early signs they're moving in that direction."

Privacy on Ethereum is already here. Aztec is the L2 that allows developers with no prior cryptography background to build smart contracts with private identity, data, and compute. Read how Aztec delivers granular programmable privacy to Ethereum: aztec.network/blog/the-aztec…

Build in bear markets

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