by Encode club and zkSync

Privacy in Layer 2 and presentation by Josh Crites from Aztec!

One of the largest remaining challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem is privacy ... In practice, using the entire suite of Ethereum applications involves making a significant portion of your life public for anyone to see and analyze.
Vitalik Buterin

It is important to differentiate the terms of Privacy, Confidentiality, and Anonymity.

There are different approaches to privacy:

  • Obfuscation
  • Hardware assistance
  • Fully Homomorphic Encryption
  • Commitment schemes and nullifiers (like zCash and Tornado Cash)

Some of the projects that are developing private solutions in Web3:

  • Aztec
  • Zama
  • Namada
  • Obscuro
  • Penumbra
  • Anoma

Josh did the second part of the lesson.

Private execution on blockchains like Aztec, Aleo, Mina, and Miden:

  1. Simulate a transaction on localhost
  2. Create the ZKP proof of this transaction
  3. Send the proof and state difference to the network
  4. The Sequencer will check the proof and create a rollup proof

Aztec uses the UTXO model like Bitcoin because they say it is impossible to use the account model like Ethereum to create a private blockchain. Thus, they don't try to implement zkEVM but rather use their own VM.

Noir is a Rust-like language that's used to write programs on Aztec. Interestingly, it uses a language-wide trusted setup, so you don't have to run it on your own.

Keep an eye on the repo where I post these notes:
https://github.com/ustas-eth/zkEVM-Bootcamp