Privacy projectAztec: Privacy L2. Technology: zero-knowledge proofs.
Aztec has been building private smart contracts for Ethereum since 2017, and along the way it wrote much of the toolchain the wider field now uses. Noir, its circuit language, has become one of the most widely adopted ways to write zero-knowledge programs anywhere. Alpha V5 activated on mainnet in July 2026, bringing private transactions live at fees under five cents, with execution and proving happening on the user's own device so plaintext never leaves it. The road here has been a long one. Aztec Connect, the first product, was retired in 2023, and contracts left deprecated behind it were exploited for 2.1 million dollars three years later. Private state is modeled as per-user notes, an elegant fit for individual confidentiality and a different shape from the shared private state institutions work across.
Key facts
- Entry type
- Privacy project
- Category
- Privacy L2
- Technology
- Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK)
- Website
- aztec.network
What is zero-knowledge proofs?
One party proves a statement about hidden data is true without revealing the data the statement is about.
How it compares with the other approaches on latency, trust assumptions and fit is set out, with sources, in the technology taxonomy.
Private by design.
See how confidential transactions work on the networks you already use.