Episode 236: Aztec Connect and Private DeFi with Charlie and Joe

Zero Knowledge

In this week’s episode, Anna checks in with Aztec, a ZK-based privacy L2 project. She speaks with Joe Andrews and Lead Engineer, Charles Julian. They discuss some of the team’s most important ZK research and implementations such as Plonk and how bringing privacy to Ethereum could truly change the way we do DeFi. They also discuss Aztec Connect and how it relates to zk.money, the Aztec roadmap with future projects like DSL Noir and Aztec 3, as well as a quick postmortem on the halted Aztec Connect launch.

Here are some links for this episode:

• Ep 176: Zk-zk-rollup & zk.money with Zac and Joe from Aztec
• Ep 75: Exploring Aztec with Zac Williamson
• Ep 232: Cutting Edge ZK Research with Mary Maller
• AZTEC Trusted Setup
• PLONK: Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge
• AztecProtocol/barretenberg: C++ elliptic curve library | GitHub
• AztecProtocol/aztec-connect-bridges | GitHub

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If you are looking to jump into ZK professionally, check out the ZK Jobs board to find job posts from some of the top teams working in ZK – like Aleo, Anoma and Mina. If you’re looking to hire, be sure to add your jobs as well! More at ZK Jobs Board.

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Today’s episode is sponsored by Aleo.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. If you’re building private applications - then check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo which enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of ZKPs. Visit leo-lang.org to start building.

You can also participate in Aleo’s incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate. For questions, join their Discord at [aleo.org/discord](aleo.org/discord)

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