Aztec took the opportunity of carrying their formal announcement of the phasing out of Aztec Connect. This happened to have been their privacy framework that played the role of an encryption layer for Ethereum. This implies the fact that the deposits made into the Aztec Connect contract will be made away with. This happens to be in the case of both zk.money, as well as zk.finance and others like it. Users will be provided a one-year time limit for carrying out withdrawals without having to pay any fees. However, their sequencer over time will lessen the number of rollup blocks for withdrawing purposes until the passing of a year when it will all come shutting down.
Shifting to the 21st of March, 2024, Aztec will cease to operate a sequencer. In this scenario, the present method will stop publishing rollup blocks that happen to be processing Aztec Connect transactions, as well as contract permissions will be withdrawn.
Also, every kind of rollup action will be stopped. This will make the process of carrying out withdrawals all the more technical and complicated. Though there may exist a community-driven sequencer, users will depend on that framework for the operation of their own sequencers for making withdrawals. At the present moment in time, Aztec has completely open-sourced the whole Aztec Connect protocol with scaling upgrades, along with a fresh and safe SDK.
The ultimate aim and intention of Aztec is to be able to build a true decentralized general-purpose encrypted zkRollup and have the safety features of Ethereum. Ethereum has been able to build a world computer that is capable of reading and writing to the public state. Aztec is in the process of making additions and creating the capability of reading and writing to the private state also. For this, they happen to be developing encrypted transactions on Ethereum.
Their first try at on-chain privacy with the utilization of a zkRollup happened to have been Aztec 1. However, it required more speed, less cost, and more efficiency. Then came their next trial, which was a set of privacy frameworks and tools for Ethereum, which they named Aztec Connect. This came with a lowering of costs and furthered privacy-related activities on Ethereum and which went over and above simplified payments and headed for arbitrary smart contract interactions. The Aztec Connect was a movement in the direction of creating a totally programmable encrypted zkRollup.
The entity’s future plans happen to be the development of two prime products which will be linked together. One is Noir, which happens to be the global language of zero knowledge, whereas the other is a new-age encrypted zkRollup. In their opinion, Noir will be the easiest and most effective method of writing programs with zero knowledge. At the present moment in time, Noir happens to be beneficial as a generalized programming language for the overall development of zk.
It is able to utilize various proving backends and authenticate any EVM chain. When further enhanced, Noir will prove to be the smart contract language for Aztec’s new-age zkRollup. Behind the Aztec Connect story has been the Aztec community, and it was successful in roping in more than 100,000 users who utilized Aztec Connect for private DeFi.
