Quit after raising $100 million? Interpretation of Aztec Network's business transformation
On March 13, Aztec Network, a ZK Rollup privacy and scaling solution, announced that it will gradually shut down its DeFi privacy bridge project Aztec Connect, and will disable depositing funds from zk.money and other front-ends (such as zkpay.finance) in a week. Aztec Connect contract.
Aztec Network added that the withdrawal function will remain open for one year, and it is expected that the Aztec Connect contract will not be completely abandoned and the Rollup sequencer will be stopped until March 21, 2024, but users are still advised to withdraw funds as soon as possible.
Aztec Network is positioned as a private ZK Rollup based on Ethereum, aiming to help users access Dapps in the Ethereum ecosystem privately and efficiently. The project has currently launched two main products, one is zk.money, a privacy transfer protocol based on Aztec Rollup, and the other is Aztec Connect, a privacy bridge linking Ethereum Dapps and Aztec Rollup.
Relying on zk.money and Aztec Connect, users can freely transfer funds without revealing their own information (address, funds, etc.), and securely access multiple mainstream DeFi protocols such as Lido, Element, Aave, Compound, and Uniswap.
Previously, Aztec Network had completed three rounds of financing.
In November 2018, Aztec Network completed a $2.1 million seed round of financing led by ConsenSys, with participation from Samos Investment, Entrepreneur First, and angel investors such as Jeffrey Tarrant and Charlie Songhurst.
In December 2021, Aztec Network completed a $17 million Series A round led by Paradigm, A Capital, Ethereal Ventures, Libertus Capital, Variant Fund, Nascent, IMToken, Scalar Capital, Defi Alliance, IOSG Ventures, ZK Validator and Anthony Individual investors including Sassano, Stani Kulechov, Bankless, Defi Dad, Mariano Conti, and Vitalik Buterin participated.
Not long ago, in December 2022, Aztec had just completed a US$100 million Series B round of financing, led by a16z, with participation from A Capital, Variant, SV Angel, HashKey Capital, Fenbushi Capital, and Alumni Ventures.
Judging from today’s official announcement, Aztec Network will give up running the above two products zk.money and Aztec Connect by itself in the future.(Note: If the user still has assets on Rollup later, he will only be able to rely on the sorter run by the community to complete the withdrawal, which will have a high technical threshold.)
However, Aztec Network stated that it has open sourced the contract code of Aztec Connect, and is happy to see the community actively fork, deploy, and run new alternative products. In the new round of Grant activities to be launched in April, Aztec Network will also provide financial support for such alternative products.
As for the Aztec Network itself, the team will focus on two new major products in the future:
One is Noir, a general-purpose development language that supports zero-knowledge proofs;
The second is a brand new privacy blockchain.
Aztec Network explained that,The project's long-term vision has always been to develop a decentralized, private, general-purpose blockchain with the security of Ethereum. In order to realize this vision, Aztec Network adopts a step-by-step development rhythm, first developing a safe and private address-to-address transfer function (Aztec 1, namely zk.money), and then realizing the smart contract interaction function on this basis ( Aztec 2, or Aztec Connect).
now,Although zk.money and Aztec Connect will be abandoned, Aztec Network itself will not stop, and will use the previous development experience and technology accumulation as a foundation, focusing on the construction of a decentralized and private general-purpose blockchain.
As a long-established project on the ZK track, coupled with the heavy financial support of leading institutions such as a16z, Aztec Network’s every move is closely watched by the market, and today’s “shutdown” announcement is no surprise. discuss.
Some people are calling for a fork of the Aztec Connect contract to continue this important infrastructure in the direction of privacy.
Some people are also exploring the reasons for the transformation of Aztec Network. For example, dForce founder Mingdao speculates that regulatory pressure is the main reason behind it—because zk.money has become the main channel for hackers to launder money after Tornado was sanctioned.
However, more discussions are concentrated in the airdrop circle. Many users believe that with the shutdown of zk.money and Aztec Connect, the interaction costs they have paid to ambush the airdrop of the project in the past will be in vain.
This worry is not unreasonable. In the announcement, Aztec Network only mentioned that it is grateful to more than 100,000 interactive users, but it did not mention how to quantify the "contribution" of these users. In addition, the new chain planned by Aztec Network will most likely adopt the new smart contract language Noir. It is still unknown whether the 0x address format can be used. If the answer is "no", how to map the existing interaction address to the new On-chain will also become a problem.
To take a step back, even if Aztec Network intends to take care of "old customers", the adjustment of business direction will cause an expected delay in the time of issuing coins. Although Aztec Network mentions that a new chain will be launched in 2023, it is after all on the ZK track, and "jumping tickets" is a routine operation...
In this way, it is not difficult to understand why the airdrop session is full of wailing, and even angrily denounced Aztec Network as the new "scumbag".
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Update in the early hours of March 14th:
In response to some doubts in the community, the Aztec Network team made the following responses:
1. The decision to shut down Aztec Connect was primarily driven by commercial considerations rather than regulation, and no regulators have contacted the team.
2. The new blockchain network planned to be launched is not Layer 1, but an updated and more powerful Rollup Layer 2 using the Noir language.
