Author: Zhixiong Pan
In the second decade of blockchain technology development, the industry is facing a fundamental philosophical and technological paradox: while Ethereum, as a "world computer," has successfully established a trustless value settlement layer, its radical transparency is evolving into an obstacle to large-scale adoption. Currently, every interaction, asset allocation, salary transfer, and even social relationship of on-chain users is exposed in a permanently immutable public panoramic prison. This "glass house"-like existence not only infringes on individual sovereignty but also excludes the vast majority of institutional capital due to the lack of trade secret protection.
2025 marks a decisive turning point in industry consensus. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin explicitly stated that "privacy is not a function, but a sanitation," defining it as the foundation of freedom and a necessary condition for social order. Just as the evolution of the internet from plaintext HTTP to encrypted HTTPS spurred the prosperity of e-commerce, Web3 is at a similar tipping point.
2025 marks a decisive turning point in industry consensus.
If Ignition Chain is the body of Aztec, then the Noir language is its soul. For a long time, the development of zero-knowledge proof applications was limited by the "two-brain problem," requiring developers to be both seasoned cryptographers and skilled engineers, manually translating business logic into low-level arithmetic circuits and polynomial constraints. This was not only inefficient but also highly prone to introducing security vulnerabilities.
The Power of Abstraction and Backend Independence
Noir's emergence is precisely to end this "Tower of Babel" era.
As an open-source domain-specific language (DSL), Noir employs a modern syntax similar to Rust, supporting advanced features such as loops, structs, and function calls. According to a developer report by Electric Capital, writing complex logic in Noir requires only one-tenth the amount of code compared to traditional circuit languages like Halo2 or Circom. For example, after migrating to Noir, the Payy privacy payment network shrunk its core codebase from thousands of lines to approximately 250 lines. More strategically significant is Noir's "backend agnosticism." Noir code compiles to an intermediate representation layer (ACIR), which can interface with any proof system that supports that standard. Noir decouples circuit representation from specific proof systems through ACIR: it comes with Barretenberg by default within the Aztec protocol stack, while ACIR can be converted/adapted to different backends such as Groth16 outside of the blockchain or in other systems. This flexibility has made Noir the universal standard across the entire ZK space, breaking down barriers between different ecosystems. Data proves the success of the Noir strategy. In Electric Capital's annual report, the Aztec/Noir ecosystem has ranked among the top five fastest-growing ecosystems for developers in the industry for two consecutive years. Currently, more than 600 projects on GitHub are built using Noir, covering everything from authentication (zkEmail) and games to complex DeFi protocols. By hosting the NoirCon global developer conference, Aztec has not only solidified its technological moat but also cultivated a vibrant ecosystem of privacy-native applications, foreshadowing a Cambrian explosion in privacy applications.
In November 2025, Aztec launched Ignition Chain on the Ethereum mainnet (currently focusing on decentralized block generation and proof processes, with transactions and contract execution expected to be gradually opened in early 2026). This is not only a technological milestone, but also a radical practice of Layer 2 decentralization.
In November 2025, Aztec launched Ignition Chain on the Ethereum mainnet (currently focusing on decentralized block generation and proof processes, with transactions and contract execution expected to be gradually opened in early 2026).
This is not only a technological milestone, but also a radical practice of the Layer 2 decentralization commitment.
The courage to start with decentralization
In the current Layer 2 scaling race, the vast majority of networks (such as Optimism and Arbitrum both relied on a single centralized sequencer in their early stages to ensure performance, postponing decentralization to a vague future. Aztec chose a completely different path: Ignition Chain operated from the outset with a decentralized validator/sequencer committee architecture, delegating key permissions to an open set of validators as early as possible. The network triggered genesis block production after the validator queue reached a threshold of 500, attracting over 600 validators to participate in block production and endorsement in its early stages. This design is not superfluous, but rather the bottom line for the survival of privacy networks. If the sequencer is centralized, regulatory agencies or powerful bodies can easily pressure it to review or reject privacy transactions from specific addresses, rendering the entire privacy network ineffective. The decentralized sorter/committee design eliminates the single point of censorship by a single sorter and significantly improves the censorship resistance of packaged transactions, provided that "honest participants exist and the protocol assumptions hold." While decentralization brings security, it also presents performance challenges. Currently, Ignition Chain's block generation time is approximately 36-72 seconds. Aztec's roadmap aims to gradually compress the current long block interval to approximately 3-4 seconds (target timeframe: end of 2026) through parallel proof generation and network layer optimization, approaching the interactive experience of the Ethereum mainnet. This signifies that privacy networks are moving from "usable" to "high-performance."
Technology itself is cold until it finds an application scenario that solves real human pain points. zkPassport is more accurately described as one of the identity verification/compliance signaling tools in the Noir ecosystem. Aztec uses its circuitry in its own scenarios to perform "minimal disclosure" compliance verification, such as sanctions list checks, thereby exploring a compromise between privacy and compliance.
From Data Collection to Fact Verification
Traditional The KYC (Know Your Customer) process requires users to upload passport photos and identification documents to a centralized server. This is not only cumbersome but also creates countless vulnerable data honeypots. zkPassport completely overturns this logic: it utilizes the NFC chip embedded in modern e-passports and government digital signatures to read and verify identity information locally through the physical contact between the phone and the passport. Subsequently, the Noir circuit generates zero-knowledge proofs in the user's local environment. Users can prove to applications that they are "over 18 years old," "belong to the permitted list/not on the prohibited jurisdiction list," and "have not been hit by sanctions checks," without revealing details such as their full date of birth and passport number. The significance of zkPassport extends far beyond identity verification. By generating passport-based anonymous identifiers, it provides a powerful "Sybil Resistance" tool for DAO governance and airdrop distribution, ensuring the fairness of "one person, one vote" while preventing the possibility of reverse tracing of users' real identities. In practice, this type of verifiable, minimally disclosed compliance signal is expected to reduce compliance friction for institutions participating in on-chain finance, but it is not equivalent to a complete KYC/AML process. Institutions can prove their compliance qualifications through zkPassport, participating in on-chain financial activities without exposing their trading strategies and fund sizes. Aztec demonstrates through this application that compliance does not necessarily mean creating a panopticon; technology can simultaneously achieve regulatory requirements and the preservation of personal privacy. Economic Model: Continuous Liquidation Auction (CCA) and Fair Distribution As fuel for decentralized networks, the issuance mechanism of the native token AZTEC itself reflects the project team's extreme pursuit of fairness. Aztec abandoned the traditional distribution model that easily leads to sniping and gas fee wars, and in collaboration with Uniswap Labs, introduced the innovative "Continuous Clearing Auction (CCA)". data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/0049efc1-1df2-4f71-adf0-1f77b9aaa8e8_1828x1144.png","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscr en":null,"imageSize":null,"height":911,"width":1456,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":194137,"alt":null,"title":null,"type&qu ot;:"image/png","href":null,"belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":"https://substack.chainfeeds.xyz/i/180724074?img=https%3A%2 F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0049efc1-1df2-4f71-adf0-1f77b9aaa8e8_1 828x1144.png","isProcessing":false,"align":null,"offset":false}" alt="" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zUm_!,w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https% 3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0049efc1-1df2-4f71-adf0-1f77b9aaa8e8_1828x1144.png 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zUm_!,w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2 F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0049efc1-1df2-4f71-adf0-1f77b9aaa8e8_1828x1144.png 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zUm_!,w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2 F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0049efc1-1df2-4f71-adf0-1f77b9aaa8e8_1828x1144.png 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zUm_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0049efc1-1df2-4f71-adf0-1f77b9aaa8e8_1828x1144.png 1456w" sizes="100vw" loading="lazy">
Price Discovery and Anti-MEV
The CCA mechanism allows the market to fully engage in competition within a set time window to discover the true price.
Within each CCA clearing cycle, trades are settled at a uniform clearing price, reducing the space for front-running and gas bidding that arises from rushing to trade first. This mechanism effectively eliminates the profit margin for front-runners, allowing retail investors to start on a level playing field with whales. More innovatively, CCA achieves an automated closed loop for issuance and liquidity establishment. The auction contract can automatically inject (partial) auction proceeds and tokens into the Uniswap v4 liquidity pool according to pre-disclosed parameters, forming an on-chain verifiable "issuance → liquidity" closed loop. This means that the AZTEC token has deep on-chain liquidity from its inception, avoiding the common price spikes and crashes of new coin listings and protecting the interests of early community participants. This more DeFi-native method of issuance and liquidity guidance is often used to illustrate a type of implementation path where AMMs can expand from "trading infrastructure" to "issuance infrastructure." Conclusion: Building the "HTTPS Era" of Web3 The Aztec Network's ecosystem, from the underlying Noir language standard to the upper-layer zkPassport application, and then to the network infrastructure of Ignition Chain, is transforming the "HTTPS upgrade" long envisioned by the Ethereum community into a usable engineering reality. This is not an isolated technological experiment, but rather echoes Ethereum-native initiatives such as Kohaku and ZKnox, jointly building a layered privacy defense system from hardware to applications. If the early development of blockchain established trustless value settlement, then the core theme going forward will be establishing data autonomy and confidentiality. In this process, Aztec plays a crucial infrastructure role: it does not attempt to replace Ethereum's transparency, but rather completes the missing half of the puzzle through "programmable privacy." With the maturation of technology and the improvement of compliance frameworks, we can expect a future where privacy is no longer an "add-on feature" but a "default attribute," a "private world computer" that retains the verifiability of public ledgers while respecting the digital boundaries of individuals.Kakao has launched an AI service that quickly turns webtoons into short video previews, cutting production time from three weeks to three hours. The cost of creating these videos has dropped by 97%, from 2 million won to just 60,000 won.
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