After eight years of building Aztec, the network is about to go live in Alpha.
While my co-founders have moved to the Aztec Foundation to focus on stewarding the Aztec Network, I am returning to what I set out to do originally, alongside many of the team members who helped build the Aztec Network: build privacy products that people actually use.
Enter Aztec Labs.
What Aztec Labs is
Aztec Labs is a standalone product company created by the network's original builders. Our goal is to ship privacy-first products that make blockchain rails usable for everyone.
We serve two roles in the ecosystem. First, we dogfood the network via the products we ship. Second, we remain one of the core contributors to the open source protocol, ensuring the network can support mainstream use cases by focusing on improvements to the decentralised node software and smart contract language.
Why we are well placed to do it
The team has been building products that require privacy for eight years. From our origins building a private debt issuance market, through ZKMoney and Aztec Connect, we know the stack inside and out because we built it.
Labs is accountable to its users. Enabling people to transact on blockchain rails with the same privacy as in the traditional financial ecosystem is our North Star. We win when the products we ship provide real people with real value. Anything else is a product failure.
Why now
Most privacy solutions in the market today are an afterthought. Features bolted on after the fact, privacy through intermediaries, middleware that forces users to jump through hoops just to unlock basic functionality.
The Aztec Network enables something fundamentally different. Privacy via advanced applied cryptography and a completely new design space. That creates a large product opportunity, and we intend to take it.
In the coming year, Aztec Labs will ship multiple products across consumer, developer, and institutional markets.
The network is ready and stewarded by an excellent, independent team at the Aztec Foundation. At Aztec Labs, a team of 30 world-class engineers is set. Products that previously could not exist onchain are now possible, and they are being built as you read this.
Joe