Zatoshi
@Zac_Aztec
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CEO @aztecnetwork. Building a privacy-first L2 on Ethereum. Cryptographer, software engineer, ex-particle physicist. Plonk co-author. Huff inventor.
Joined July 2018
To read the full article in its unedited form, see To learn more about Aztec, see
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Confused by cryptography jargon?. You're not alone. Here's a translation table to help.
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In light of the TornadoCash ban, I have some thoughts on the future of privacy networks that I would like to share with you all. Despite the dark circumstances of the present, there are grounds to be optimistic about the future for web3. A short 🧵 on why. .
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Today we've announced Aztec's $100M Series B fundraise, lead by a16z. We raised this money so that we can execute on the Aztec's core vision:. To build a fully end-to-end encrypted, *programmable* blockchain network.
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Story time 📖! Today we’re announcing our Series A fundraise, led by Paradigm 🎉. I want to take the opportunity to dive back into the past and write about the origin of Aztec’s keystone technology, the universal ZK-SNARK, PLONK.
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gm gang, we've been hard at work building the Aztec L2 and I want to give an update!. We're building a full end-to-end testnet and we're close to completing this breakthrough technology. It will be the world's 1st decentralized, privacy-first programmable L2. Kind of a big deal.
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i’ve been working on this exact thing for seven years and now the KOLs are clout farming with their microbrain ‘hot takes’ because privacy is the new meme narrative. and by my current count it takes at least 70 developers, not 1.
ZATOSHI AND ZETHEREUM.Here’s a bold plan for how one brave engineer could strike a blow for internet freedom while bringing Ethereum all the way back: they just need to go Zatoshi and build Zethereum. What does that mean? It means an pseudonymous developer with impeccable opsec.
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Hello everybody. I need to make a very difficult announcement that has been weighing on my conscience for some time. Plonk isn’t real. We made it all up. @rel_zeta_tech and I are not even cryptographers. Allow me to explain… (1/🧵).
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Imagine a world where any bozo with a laptop can create a privacy-preserving smart contract. We're building that. Cryptography is not a crime.
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If you want to get back in touch with the cypherpunk ethos that spawned blockchain, just imagine what it looks like in 20 years if we fail. It's a dystopian world:.
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Hey @balajis thank u 4 pilling me abt privacy. been googling it since yesterday and it’s great!. why has nobody been working on this before?.
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Me and my team putting together the Aztec 3 ZK-SNARK circuit architecture:
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Cryptography should be open source. Parents kill innovation. Confession: in 2018 I drafted a patent for one of Aztec’s early technologies. We were a young startup and I was afraid that larger competitors would iterate on our tech and outcompete us. The experience left a bad.
If @zama_fhe and @randhindi believe in their work, we invite them to compete with @sunscreentech in a way that moves the industry forward rather than engage in secret campaigns of intimidation, IP trolling, and speech suppression. Thread 🧵👇. On December 3, following a 6+ month.
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Those of us working in privacy talk a lot about ideas and narratives, but if the technology doesn’t exist, we’re all 💩 out of luck. @aztecnetwork has spent the last 3 years focused on addressing fast client-side snark recursion, and we’ve finally done it. Let me explain….
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a woman is getting more hate at the Olympics than a man who raped a 12 year old. the amount of disrespect shown on CT is disappointing. Most of y’all wouldn’t have a pot to piss in if not for the dozens of trans hackers who built tech you’re profiting off of.
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been messing around with noir and got a 250x speedup for verifying rsa signatures vs the existing lib. 2,048 bit RSA sig now verifies in 28k constraints. lib is super unfinished will share deets when stable. should help with passport proofs, zk email etc. noir gud.
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Before my ADHD diagnosis I was a middling developer struggling with basic life skills. 6 years on, my startup raised a $100m series B, built (in part) on my research in a field unknown to me 6yr ago. Bitterly disappointed my tax £ funds a system set up to restrict care for people.
🧵- Wasn’t sure I’d share my recent GP experience re. private ADHD diagnosis, but in the wake of this horrifying BBC Panorama ep I don’t think we have a choice but to confront these people with the harm they’re causing by pushing this wildly irresponsible narrative. So here goes:.
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I had a great time at ETHCC, but the best way to describe the vibe was stagnation. Everyone is selling undifferentiated block space and nobody is buying because there's not a need for it. And it makes me even more bullish on what we’re doing at @aztecnetwork.
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Any ZK peeps feel like getting nerd-sniped? 👀. Introducing Goblin Plonk! A new (very lazy) scheme for blazing fast ZK SNARK recursion:
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It has come to my attention that documentation standards at Aztec might have slipped somewhat.
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Gm gang. Got some new crypto for y'all, fresh from @TKohrita, @towa_patrick at @aztecnetwork. Zeromorph is the missing link we needed to make Plonk go stratospheric. Here's why 🧵.
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Most founders face the question of pivoting at some point in their journey. It’s not an admission of failure, but rather a recognition of purpose and direction. Let me tell you how @aztecnetwork pivoted:.
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TEEs are a crutch for weak people who don’t want to solve hard problems. Fight me.
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Just finished an amazing engineering off-site with the team!. 10 days of hacking to prep our sandbox release. Will do an info dump soon™. Highlight was getting private touchID verification working in an Aztec contract. Getting web2 auth flows into web3 will be game-changing 👀.
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gm gang. i hit up the vscode grindcore set and pressed some fresh ZK-RSA for the good people of this earth. . 27k gates for a 2,048 bit sig. 300x faster than our old stuff. share and enjoy.
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This will be my seventh year working on privacy technologies in web3. Great works take time. Effecting change takes time. I’m not going anywhere.
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As a founder I've made a lot of hard decisions. But the hardest one was deciding to write our docs in American English, not British English. I have betrayed the cultural legacy of my kin 🪦.
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Today is an important day for Aztec as we share our product roadmap. After seven YEARS of building in public, this is a massive leap forward in mass blockchain adoption and a milestone I’ve been looking forward to sharing as we continue our journey toward full decentralization.
1/ Aztec is committed to bringing privacy and decentralization together. Imagine a world where developers can write programs that protect user data but take full advantage of a trustless, permissionless system. That’s where we’re headed, and this product roadmap is how we’ll
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The mad lad finally did it!. I know how hard @drakefjustin has been working to get a SNARK ASIC out of the door. This has been years in the making. Congratulations!.
The first ever SNARK proving ASIC 👀. Real-time proving, real-time settlement, universal synchronous composability—coming sooner than most think :). We can fix Ethereum fragmentation!
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this is the real flippening. gg gang ❤️
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Can you imagine being able to Google your friend’s bank account number to see how much money they have. ?. But we’re OK with Googling anyone’s Ethereum wallet?.
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A BTC client implemented on ETH via ZKPs would enable a 𝒕𝒓𝒖𝒔𝒕𝒍𝒆𝒔𝒔 bridge to convert BTC into BTC-on-Ethereum. If BTC does not implement ZKPs this bridge will be one-way. Black-swan timeline is that ETH doesn't kill BTC, it devours it.
I sure hope so, but I fear by the time Bitcoin implements ZKP verification it'll be too late.
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We did it! Getting a devnet working is a huge engineering feat. I'm so proud of how far we've come and we're just getting started on bringing programmable privacy into production. Off to touch some grass.
Devnet is now live! 🎉. To celebrate, we’re launching Alpha Build, a series of three developer sprints with a USD $100,000 prize pool and the opportunity to deploy on the Aztec Network for the first time. Learn more and get involved ⤵️.
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I want privacy to protect individuals from surveillance states. You want privacy so your wife's boyfriend can't see that you got rugged by an L2 ponzi, again. We are not the same.
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The depressing thing is that we’ve been through this already with the World Wide Web. We don’t arrest internet service providers for the data in their cables. We don’t arrest DNS providers for signing illegal traffic. For web3 to thrive it must remain credibly neutral.
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"I am the wisest man alive because I know that I know nothing" - hipster Socrates shilling zk-proofs 2,400 years before they were cool.
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🔥. When I was 17 I built a 4-bit a CPU from scratch. What I learned directly contributed to my work with ZK-SNARKS and L2 architectures. Once you know how low-level computer engineering works, you see patterns everywhere in web3.
Excited 🔥 to get my hands on these 3 hardware kits: .- 8 bit computer kit.- 6502 computer kit.- World's worst video card kit. Figured out that if I had to build blockchains I better be good at building computers from scratch!. See you on the other side, let's build! 🚀
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"If you're open source, what's your defensibility moat?". "We code in C++".
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CT has been going nutso lately. A lot of frustration with the EF, its culture and leadership. I get it, I've interacted with them for almost 8 years. But there's a desire for EF to be something it simply cannot be. For Ethereum to succeed, EF can only play a supporting role.
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brb gonna trademark the Aztec Empire and sue the history channel.
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I'm very excited about the year ahead for Aztec. Some highlights to look out for:. • publishing our yellow paper.• fully integrating our cryptography into our end-to-end transactions.• upgrading the sandbox to be remotely-hosted and converting into a testnet. We've come a long.
◈ In Aztec Labs history, there is only before 2023 and after. In the before times, there was blood, sweat, and tears. After, there was glory. And privacy on-chain.
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Great paper. Remember folks, if you don't hash your input string it's not Fiat Shamir™, just sparkling Shamir.
#ePrint Weak Fiat-Shamir Attacks on Modern Proof Systems: Q Dao, J Miller, O Wright, P Grubbs
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This will be my eighth year working on privacy technologies in web3. Great works take time. Effecting change takes time. I’m not going anywhere.
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in New Zealand, at the bottom of the world and touching grass. gonna sign off for a bit and enjoy the good earth and its people. don’t let CT rot your brain, anon ❤️
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Before going into that, I want to describe what the near future *could* look like for privacy networks:. 1. Private by default.2. Fully decentralised.3. User-side compliance; users can selectively prove parts of their identity. E.g not on a sanctions list.4. Open and programmable.
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Money is commodified human agency. We are not truly free if we cannot control our own finances. We cannot control our finances without financial privacy.
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I don’t have to imagine and I’m honestly not bothered. I care about adding value, not shuffling existing value around with multisigs. ZK is a hard road that one walks to solve hard problems.
imagine spending years of your life developing groundbreaking validity proofs for zero knowledge rollups to ensure the safest and most scalable execution environment for the future of finance, only to learn you could have gotten $450 million by launching a 3/5 multisig instead.
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I want to live in a world where somber businessmen, who take themselves seriously and settle in sumptuous meeting rooms, have severe discussions whose solemn transcripts sometimes contain, by context, by *neccessity*, the word "plonk". lol.
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First, who am I?. I’m the CEO of Aztec, a programmable privacy layer for Ethereum. I am also a cryptographer and co-inventor of the PLONK ZK-SNARK protocol. Many projects in this space build on my research and draw from the open source cryptographic algorithms I have written.
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Soooo I may have just asked the founder of @NEARProtocol if he knew what a zk rollup was 💀
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Hello! Want to build with privacy tech but unsure what to build?. This is a thread of @NoirLang projects I'd build if I had the time!. Feel free to steal at your leisure👌.
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At long last we at @aztecnetwork have launched Aztec Connect!. This has been an epic project and it feels surreal to finally be able to pull it into the real world. This is a 🧵 about the people behind it all, my dear friends and colleagues ❤️
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Gm noir gang. Guess what time it is? Its fresh-pressed organic handmade noir library dropping time. Today for y’all we’ve got something really special; a fully-featured, efficient JSON parser. imma explain to y’all why this a big deal. .
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Procrastination is the key to success?. Perhaps not in life but in IVC! Behold Goblin Plonk, an IVC scheme which delays hard operations & transforms them into easy operations. Goblin Plonk can lead to an order of magnitude savings in circuit-gate count.
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@dystopiabreaker Base peer-review standard: approval of two subject experts . Based peer-review standard: survived two weeks of Twitter reply-guy comments.
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Paradigm has been a huge net positive for the web3 community. The Blast saga is. weird as hell, but this is a fair and measured statement by Paradigm. Disclaimer: Paradigm backed Aztec so I'm 100% biased. I like Paradigm. Bite me.
There are a lot of components of Blast that I’m excited about and would be interested in engaging with people on. That said, we at Paradigm think the announcement this week crossed lines in both messaging and execution. For example, we don’t agree with the decision to launch the.
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privacy is a human right. we all know how this dutch circus will end - with a miserable display of petty, bureaucratic despotism and the conviction of a good man. I hope I'm wrong.
1/ gm from the Netherlands. @alex_pertsev's trial starts today. he stands accused of laundering $1.2B via Tornado Cash. I believe he should be free—open source devs should NOT be held criminally liable for the crimes of foreign terrorists!.
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The problem is that they are not fighting people or institutions. They are fighting a technology. Trying to ban cryptographic algorithms makes as much sense as trying to ban math.
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Keccak256 in 18,000 width-4 PLONKish constraints 👀.
UltraPlonk Keccak256 ✅.
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Looking back, the TornadoCash ban will be seen as an act of self-harm that limited the US from reaping the wealth and job creation produced by this revolutionary industry.
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Treating open-source cryptographic software as a sanctioned entity is a dark step backwards that reminds me of the 1990s when sharing cryptography software could have you labelled as an international arms trafficker.
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Watching this felt very bittersweet. Hal Finney was a true pioneer. If only he could see how far his ideas have flown.
✨New video of #Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney unearths a 25-year-old talk on zero-knowledge crypto . The 1st time I've ever heard him speak 🧡
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This is a big step forward for zero-knowledge proofs. Brilliant work by @dlubarov and the Polygon Zero folks!.
We're excited to announce Plonky2, an implementation of PLONK+FRI which is focused on fast recursion. After experimenting with several approaches, we've reached a level of performance that we're happy with, with recursive proofs taking ~170 ms on a Macbook Pro.
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Speaking at Devcon’s main stage was an incredible experience. Good things take time, hard things take even longer. Do hard things.
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Building our protocol circuits in noir is a major milestone for us, and demonstrates the maturity of our technology. It wasn’t always this way. Let me tell you a story about high technology drama, featuring barretenberg and noir. 🧵.
It has long been our goal to align the Aztec and Noir development paths. Today we're excited to announce that we've achieved it, and in less than a month:. Aztec's core circuits are now written in Noir. Noir 🤝 Aztec:
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The post-Istanbul comedown is real. I had such a wonderful time, made meaningful connections, strengthened friendships and forged wonderful memories. So long everybody, and thanks for all the frogs 🫡.
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congratulations to the Aleo team! A main net launch is an epic feat of strength. We need more privacy projects pulled into the real world ❤️.
wen mainnet? now.
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gm noir gang. got a fresh lib for y'all straight from the code factory. this time we're searching strings i.e. "string X contains string Y". gud for zk email and efficient. can do variable-size strings, scanning 1kb only costs 3k gates. share and enjoy.
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One of the best parts of working in zk-web3 is that we created a community where everybody benefits from open shared research. Not giving people their dues for their hard work undermines the foundations our community is built upon.
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Peter Higgs passed away today at 94 years old. Rest in peace to a legend in particle physics.
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Hey keyboard warrior, code’s at if you want to walk the walk. Have fun getting paid in twitter likes and reply guy comments.
Fork Aztec Protocol and release under an anonDAO.
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For folks that don't know the difference:. Trusted Setup: 1-time generation of an encrypted secret. If anybody knows the secret the zk rollup isn't secure. Multisig: Small group of privileged individuals who can control/change a smart contract. And now you know.
If your critic doesn't know the difference between a trusted setup and a multisig, they're not much of a critic.
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be smart enough to make progress and too stupid to know when to quit.
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If your application uses SGX, chances are your only alternatives are:. 1. grind for years developing a zk-SNARK replacement.2. grind for years developing a FHE replacement.3. grind for years developing an MPC replacement.4. give up. Hard choice to make.
How many active exploits must we see (this is now the second in a row for SGX) before people stop treating trusted hardware enclaves as this holy grail. The entire concept is broken at its core.
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Regeneration: dreams of an autonomus future. I want to tell you of a story. About complicated people, and their struggles to resolve the wreckage of their contradictions. We are at a unique point in history and stand at the threshold of two worlds.
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Merry Christmas everyone. May we be inspired by how Jesus Christ closed his first funding round on the day he founded Christianity (three wise king KOL round).
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The rise of @huff_language is one of those delightful and unexpected events that I'll never truly understand.
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“We compose iterative succinct Honk instances using twin-folded protogalaxy over the bn/grumpkin cycle. Combined with a Goblin Plonk accelerator we get a succinct IVC scheme with strong constants.". I love my job.
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The entrepreneur lifecycle:. Drop out of school.Found startup.Exit for $$$.Become VC.Buy vineyard.Gardening gardening gardening .Die.
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Yeah happy to. The key diff. between Plonk and Groth16 is that Plonk describes the arithmetisation of a SNARK circuit that can be build on top of any polynomial commitment scheme. 1/🧵.
@Zac_Aztec @SoSoCrypto2 @PolygonHermez @jbaylina Can you dive deeper into why groth cannot handle a zkEVM.
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I am very sad to read this. Sismo were a great team trying to do something truly novel and innovative. They were one of the good ones. Best of luck to you @dhadrien_ and your team - I'm looking forward to whatever you do next!.
Today, Sismo returned funds to its investors. We shipped fast, solved hard problems and built a great community. Yet, our pace was unsustainable, we sprinted a marathon. I'm proud of the battle we fought and the way we did it, with full engagement and passion. (thread).
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Programmable privacy will create exponential growth opportunities for crypto. Once users can link encrypted identities to cryptocurrency accounts, off-chain assets can be issued and traded on-chain without custodial middlemen.
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congrats on the launch!. RISC0's vision is🔥and when they first started out I thought they were far too ahead of their time and would not be able to produce a practical risc prover. Looks like I was mistaken on that, very impressive work.
Introducing zkVM 1.0: The Future of Verifiable Computation🌐. Today, we're excited to launch the world's first and most performant, production-ready zkVM. zkVM 1.0 makes zero-knowledge proofs scalable, accessible, and cost-effective for any chain.
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Their actions also undermine US dollar hegemony. The damage done to USDC by these actions is incalculable. Centrally backed dollar stablecoins now have a risk premium attached to them.
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what a wonderful weekend at @ETHGlobal . huge shout out to @TomFrench_eth , @omw_to_the_moon, @CatMcGeeCode and @kevaundray for helping our noir hackers!. really excited to show off the zk tech folks built here with @NoirLang 😎
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