Having unstoppable, decentralized privacy is unbelievably challenging. Aztec is utterly unique in what it offers. If it’s backdoored or centralised you are going to FEEL that in 2027. Hardened, open protocols are essential to survive what’s coming.

I’m happy to announce Aztec’s post-quantum roadmap. I can’t predict if or when quantum computers will happen, but we have been preparing since day 1 of designing Aztec. Aztec today is highly quantum resistant and our protocol already defends against harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks. Migrating to a fully post-quantum system is a major challenge but one we are prepared for. By the end of 2030, Aztec is going to be fully post-quantum.

Earlier this year me & my team intensely focused on AI-accelerating Aztec’s prover tech. A lot of staring at benchmarks and algorithms and flame graphs. I never imagined that such improvements could be made on top of the work we already did. Just remarkable.

Justin Drake’s call for “bunker mode” and mass migration, alongside talk of cryptographic breaks within months, is hyperbolic. There is no evidence of a new attack on elliptic curves or any quantitative basis for a short-term timetable for such attacks emerging. Prominent researchers need to consider how non-experts will receive their language. Speculating that within months individuals could break cryptographic primitives that the internet and digital economy rely on carries consequences. It is a huge leap from AI making progress in other fields of mathematics to predicting the imminent failure of primitives that have faced decades of cryptanalysis. The idea that hash functions are safer from AI than elliptic curves is speculation. Hash functions contain structure, and we model them as random oracles without justifying proofs. There is no evidence that elliptic curve cryptography is more vulnerable to AI than symmetric cryptography. If historical human-led analysis is any predictor of the future, the opposite is more likely. The worst possible reaction to AI developments is to rush into new cryptographic primitives, away from multi-decade old hardened primitives, because somebody is claiming they are safe. I worry that this is an inevitable consequence of the current discourse. Because of the last 48 hours users are worrying about speculative non-existent black hats, who apparently have the capability of signing OS upgrades and forging bank credentials, from draining their wallets. To protect against speculative threats Ethereum is pulling talent and attention into base-layer primitives and technological iteration, instead of increasing demand for block space by building compelling applications users want and love. I don’t want to dismiss the considerable advances in mathematics that AI is driving. It is important to understand the nature of these improvements. If its success in other mathematical fields applies to elliptic curves, my expectation is that AI will grind its way to finding algorithms that improve on the current state of the art. That could mean shaving off a few bits of security. It would be prudent to discuss whether we need to increase key sizes and by how much. I can’t guarantee that AI won’t find total breaks, and neither can anyone else. My speculation as a domain expert does not make my speculation authoritative. We should also be using AI to investigate whether searching the parameter space can yield new, more secure curves. We can investigate whether some of these “structure = bad” hunches have any basis in reality. For example, we could use AI to see if the extra structure in Koblitz curves enables attacks beyond the small speedups we know about. This would give us actual evidence to make informed decisions. If non-experts hear that the cryptography underpinning the digital economy could fail within months, the rational response is to withdraw all digital money (on-chain and off) and hoard gold under the bed. I think the past 48 hours has unnecessarily undermined confidence in the entire concept of blockchains and digital money.

When Vitalik says he isn’t giving up, I think of someone that has just spent half an hour writing three sentences, then sent them to the only person they felt able to tell. I think of that person, and all the people who haven’t found the words yet, and I remember that the fight for privacy is a fight for dignity, a fight for choice, and a fight for freedom; the freedom to be wrong, the freedom to be ashamed, and the freedom to choose. We must never forget how much ordinary life there is within this word and we must NEVER let them make us think otherwise.

the apps that check you're a real human make you prove it from scratch, every time captcha here, wallet age there, some KYC form over there how many times have you re-proven you're human this week? what if you did it once and carried it everywhere?

🚨 Alpha Friday is today! 3PM UTC, in Discord. Special guest @Zac_Aztec, CEO & Co-founder of @aztecnetwork - talking private settlement, agent payments, and what's next for privacy. Don't miss it 👇

great piece by @lmatsakis Dario seems to have persuaded neither Washington nor Beijing that AI could pose grave risks. Part of the gap may be political and relate to some fundamental ways of understanding the world. Politicians and AI researchers have very different ideas about where power lies, and what could escape their control. But AI companies also have a communication problem. The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident is alarming once you understand what happened—but how can you explain to an auntie that this thing is actually dangerous and very different from computer worms??? My reading of “We Must Pace the Frontier” is that Dario is asking governments to help companies coordinate so safety work can keep up with AI development. That’s an enormous ask. If I were a politician without a technical background, I’d want a plain account of the what is the danger, the evidence, and exactly what I’m being asked to do—and why I should even listen. Frontier labs are trying to communicate a sense of urgency that governments don’t yet share, and I’ve realized the cognitive Venn diagram between Silicon Valley’s frontier AI companies and Washington is still very small. AI companies need to spend time translating urgent warnings into language that’s understandable and common sense. And so far “AI hacking Hugging Face is dangerous” and “AI will kill us all” are neither commonsensical nor understandable.