After raising $100 million, why did Aztec abandon Aztec Connect and seek transformation?
Wool party calls him a "scumbag."Original Title: "Stopped After Raising $100 Million? Analyzing Aztec Network's Business Transformation"
Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
On March 13, ZK Rollup privacy and scalability solution Aztec Network announced that it will gradually shut down its DeFi privacy bridge project Aztec Connect, and will disable deposits into the Aztec Connect contract from zk.money and other frontends (such as zkpay.finance) one week later.
Aztec Network added that the withdrawal function will remain open for one year, and it is expected to completely abandon the Aztec Connect contract and stop operating the Rollup sequencer by March 21, 2024, but users are still advised to withdraw their funds as soon as possible.
Aztec Network is positioned as a privacy-focused ZK Rollup on Ethereum, aimed at helping users access Ethereum ecosystem Dapps privately and efficiently. The project has currently launched two main products: the privacy transfer protocol zk.money based on Aztec Rollup, and the privacy bridge Aztec Connect that links Ethereum Dapps and Aztec Rollup.
With zk.money and Aztec Connect, users can transfer funds freely without exposing their information (addresses, funds, etc.) and safely 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 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, with participation from A Capital, Ethereal Ventures, Libertus Capital, Variant Fund, Nascent, IMToken, Scalar Capital, Defi Alliance, IOSG Ventures, ZK Validator, and individual investors such as Anthony Sassano, Stani Kulechov, Bankless, Defi Dad, Mariano Conti, and Vitalik Buterin.
Just recently, in December 2022, Aztec completed a $100 million Series B round led by a16z, with participation from A Capital, Variant, SV Angel, HashKey Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Alumni Ventures, and others.
In light of today's official announcement, Aztec Network will abandon the independent operation of the aforementioned two products, zk.money and Aztec Connect. (Note: If users still have assets on the Rollup afterwards, they will only be able to rely on community-operated sequencers to complete withdrawals, which will have a higher technical threshold.)
However, Aztec Network stated that it has open-sourced the contract code of Aztec Connect and is pleased to see the community actively fork, deploy, and run new alternative products. In the upcoming Grant initiative starting in April, Aztec Network will also provide funding support for such alternative products.
As for Aztec Network itself, the team will focus on two new main products in the future:
One is the general-purpose programming language Noir that supports zero-knowledge proofs;
The other is a brand new privacy-focused blockchain.
Aztec Network explained that the long-term vision of the project has always been to develop a decentralized, privacy-focused general-purpose blockchain with the security level of Ethereum. To achieve this vision, Aztec Network has adopted a gradual development pace, first developing a secure and private inter-address transfer function (Aztec 1, i.e., zk.money), and then implementing smart contract interaction functionality (Aztec 2, i.e., Aztec Connect) based on that.
Now, although zk.money and Aztec Connect will be abandoned, Aztec Network itself will not stop and will use its previous development experience and technical accumulation as a foundation to focus on building a decentralized, privacy-focused general-purpose blockchain.
As an established project in the ZK space, coupled with significant support from leading institutions like a16z, every move by Aztec Network is closely monitored by the market, and today's "shutdown" announcement has unsurprisingly sparked intense discussions within the community.
Some are calling for a fork of the Aztec Connect contract to continue this important infrastructure in the privacy direction.
Others are exploring the reasons behind Aztec Network's transformation, such as dForce founder Mingdao speculating that regulatory pressure is the main underlying cause ------ because after Tornado faced sanctions, zk.money has become a primary channel for hackers to launder money.
However, more discussions are focused on the airdrop community, with many users believing that with the shutdown of zk.money and Aztec Connect, the interaction costs they previously incurred to position themselves for the project's airdrop will be in vain.
This concern is not unfounded, as Aztec Network only mentioned its gratitude to over 100,000 interacting users in the announcement, but did not specify how it would quantify these users' "contributions." Additionally, the new chain planned by Aztec Network will likely adopt a new smart contract language, Noir, and whether it will retain the 0x address format remains unknown. If the answer is "no," how to map existing interaction addresses to the new chain will also become a challenge.
To take a step back, even if Aztec Network intends to take care of "old customers," the adjustment in business direction will also cause delays in the expected token issuance timeline. Although Aztec Network mentioned that it would launch the new chain within 2023, it is still in the ZK space, where "delays" are a common occurrence…
In this way, it is not difficult to understand why there is a chorus of lament in the airdrop community, even angrily accusing Aztec Network of being the new "bad boyfriend."
