Author: Zhixiong Pan In the second decade of blockchain technology development, the industry is facing a fundamental philosophical and technological paradox: while Ethereum, as a "world computer," has successfully established a trustless value settlement layer, its radical transparency is becoming an obstacle to widespread adoption. Currently, every interaction, asset allocation, salary transfer, and even social relationship among on-chain users is exposed to a permanently immutable public panoramic prison. This "glass house"-like existence not only infringes on individual sovereignty but also excludes the vast majority of institutional capital due to the lack of trade secret protection. 2025 marks a decisive turning point in industry consensus. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin explicitly stated that "privacy is not a function, but a health measure," defining it as the foundation of freedom and a necessary condition for social order. Just as the evolution of the internet from plaintext HTTP to encrypted HTTPS spurred the boom in e-commerce, Web3 is at a similar tipping point. Backed by approximately $119 million in funding, Aztec Network (the Ignition architecture) is driving Ethereum towards an infrastructure upgrade towards programmable privacy through Ignition Chain, the Noir language ecosystem, and Noir-based proof applications like zkPassport. Macro Narrative: From Single-Point Breakthroughs to the Depth of "Overall Privacy" Defense The Ethereum ecosystem's understanding of privacy has evolved beyond a single coin mixing protocol into a "Holistic Privacy" architecture that spans the network, hardware, and application layers. This paradigm shift became a focal point at the 2025 Devconnect conference, establishing that privacy protection must possess full-stack defense depth. Refactoring Software Standards: Kohaku and Stealth Metaaddresses The Kohaku reference implementation, led by the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy Exploration Team (PSE), marks the transition of privacy technology from a "wild plugin" to a "legitimate force." Kohaku is more than just a wallet SDK; it attempts to fundamentally restructure the account system. By introducing the "Stealth Meta-Address" mechanism, Kohaku allows the recipient to publish only a static meta-public key, while the sender generates a unique, one-time on-chain address for each transaction based on elliptic curve cryptography. To external observers, these transactions appear as if they were sent to a random black hole, making it impossible to establish a correlation with the user's true identity. Furthermore, Kohaku provides reusable integration components around mechanisms such as stealth meta-addresses and stealth addresses, attempting to move privacy capabilities from "plug-ins" to a more standardized wallet infrastructure. The Last Bastion of Hardware Defense: ZKnox and the Quantum Threat If Kohaku safeguards the logic at the software level, then ZKnox, an Ethereum Foundation (EF)-funded project that fills the hardware gaps in the ecosystem, focuses on addressing deeper key security and future threats. With the increasing prevalence of ZK applications, more and more sensitive witnesses (potentially containing key materials, identity data, or transaction details) need to participate in the proof and signature process on the terminal side, thus expanding the risk of leakage when clients are compromised. ZKnox focuses more on improving and implementing the infrastructure to make quantum-resistant cryptography "usable and inexpensive" on Ethereum (e.g., promoting related pre-compilations to reduce the computational cost of lattice cryptography), paving the way for future migration to PQ signature schemes. More importantly, in the face of the potential threat that quantum computing may pose to traditional elliptic curve cryptography in the 2030s, ZKnox is focusing on infrastructure work to make quantum-resistant cryptography available and cheap enough on Ethereum. For example, EIP-7885 proposes to add NTT pre-compilation to reduce the on-chain verification cost of lattice cryptography (including schemes such as Falcon) and pave the way for future PQ migration. Aztec's historical standing and technological architecture: Defining the "Private World Computer" In the evolution of the privacy field, Aztec occupies a unique niche. Unlike the pseudonym mechanism of the Bitcoin era, and surpassing the single "transactional privacy" offered by Zcash or Tornado Cash, Aztec is committed to achieving Turing-complete "programmable privacy." Its core team includes the co-inventors of the PLONK zero-knowledge proof system, which gives Aztec a deep-rooted ability for original cryptographic innovation. Hybrid State Model: Breaking the Impossible Triangle The biggest challenge in building a privacy-preserving smart contract platform lies in how to handle state. Traditional blockchains are either entirely public state (like Ethereum) or entirely private state (like Zcash). Aztec creatively proposes a hybrid state model: at the private level, it adopts a Bitcoin-like UTXO model, storing user assets and data as encrypted "Notes". These tickets are marked "spent/expired" by generating corresponding nullifiers, thus preventing double-spending and maintaining privacy regarding ticket content and ownership. At the public level, Aztec maintains publicly verifiable public state, which is updated by public functions in the network-side public execution environment. This architecture allows developers to mix private and public functions within the same smart contract. For example, a decentralized voting application can expose the global state of "total votes," but keep "who voted" and "what voted" strictly confidential through private state. Dual Execution Model: A Harmony of PXE and AVM Aztec's execution is split into two layers: client and network. Private functions are executed in the client's PXE and generate proofs and commitments related to the private state. Public state transitions are executed by the sequencer (running a public execution environment/VM) and generate (or delegate to the prover network to generate) proofs of validity that can be verified on Ethereum. Client-Side Proving: All private data processing occurs within the user's local Private Execution Environment (PXE). Whether generating transactions or computing logic, the user's private key and plaintext data never leave their device. The PXE is responsible for running the circuit locally and generating a zero-knowledge proof. Public Execution and Verification (AVM): Users only submit the generated proofs to the network. On the network side, the sorter/block-producing committee verifies the private proofs and re-executes the public parts during the packaging process. The public contract logic is executed in the AVM and incorporated into the final validity proof that can be verified on Ethereum. This separation of "private inputs on the client and public state transitions verifiable" compresses the conflict between privacy and verifiability within the boundaries of the provable interface, without requiring the entire network to see all plaintext data. Interoperability and Cross-Layer Communication: Portals and Asynchronous Message Passing Under the Ignition architecture, Aztec does not treat Ethereum as a "background execution engine" to proxy the execution of DeFi instructions. Instead, it establishes an L1↔L2 communication abstraction through Portals. Since private execution needs to be "prepared and proven" in advance on the client side, and public state modification must be executed by the sequencer at the chain head, Aztec's cross-domain calls are designed as a one-way, asynchronous message passing model: L2 contracts can initiate call intentions to the L1 portal (or vice versa), and the message becomes consumable in subsequent blocks through the rollup mechanism. Applications need to explicitly handle failure and rollback scenarios. Rollup contracts take on key responsibilities such as maintaining the state root, verifying state transition proofs, and moving message queue states, thereby enabling composable interactions with Ethereum while maintaining privacy constraints. Strategic Engine: Noir Language and the Democratization of Zero-Knowledge Development If Ignition Chain is the body of Aztec, then the Noir language is its soul. For a long time, the development of zero-knowledge proof applications was limited by the "two-brain problem," requiring developers to be both seasoned cryptographers and skilled engineers, manually translating business logic into low-level arithmetic circuits and polynomial constraints. This was not only inefficient but also highly prone to introducing security vulnerabilities. The power of abstraction is independent of the backend. Noir emerged to end this "Tower of Babel" era. As an open-source domain-specific language (DSL), Noir employs a modern syntax similar to Rust, supporting advanced features such as loops, structs, and function calls. According to a developer report from Electric Capital, writing complex logic in Noir requires only one-tenth the amount of code compared to traditional circuit languages (such as Halo2 or Circom). For example, after migrating to Noir, Payy's privacy payment network reduced its core codebase from thousands of lines to approximately 250 lines. More strategically significant is Noir's "Backend Agnosticism." Noir code compiles to an intermediate representation layer (ACIR), which can interface with any proof system that supports the standard. Noir decouples circuit representation from specific proof systems through ACIR: it comes with Barretenberg by default within the Aztec protocol stack, while ACIR can also be converted/adapted to different backends such as Groth16 outside the chain or in other systems. This flexibility makes Noir a universal standard in the entire ZK field, breaking down barriers between different ecosystems. Ecosystem Explosion and Developer Moats Data proves the success of the Noir strategy. In Electric Capital's annual report, the Aztec/Noir ecosystem has ranked among the top five fastest-growing ecosystems for developers across the industry for two consecutive years. Currently, more than 600 projects on GitHub are built using Noir, covering everything from authentication (zkEmail) and games to complex DeFi protocols. By hosting the NoirCon global developer conference, Aztec has not only solidified its technological moat but also fostered a vibrant ecosystem of privacy-focused native applications, foreshadowing a Cambrian explosion in privacy applications. Network Cornerstone: Decentralized Practices of Ignition Chain In November 2025, Aztec launched Ignition Chain on the Ethereum mainnet (currently focusing on decentralized block generation and proof processes, with transactions and contract execution expected to be gradually opened in early 2026). This is not only a technological milestone, but also a radical practice of Layer 2 decentralization. The courage to start with decentralization In the current Layer 2 scaling race, most networks (such as Optimism and Arbitrum) rely on a single centralized sequencer in the early stages to ensure performance, postponing decentralization to an uncertain future. Aztec chose a completely different path: Ignition Chain operated from the outset with a decentralized validator/orderer committee architecture, and delegated key permissions to an open set of validators as much as possible. The network triggered genesis block production after the validator queue reached a startup threshold of 500, and attracted 600+ validators to join and participate in the block production and endorsement process in the early stages after its launch. This design is not superfluous; it is the bottom line for the survival of privacy networks. If the sorter is centralized, regulatory agencies or powerful bodies can easily pressure it to review or reject privacy transactions from specific addresses, rendering the entire privacy network ineffective. The decentralized sorter/committee design eliminates the single point of censorship by a single sorter and significantly improves the censorship resistance of packaged transactions, assuming the existence of honest participants and the validity of the protocol assumptions. Performance Roadmap While decentralization brings security, it also presents performance challenges. Currently, Ignition Chain's block generation time is approximately 36-72 seconds. Aztec's roadmap aims to gradually compress the current long block interval to around 3-4 seconds (target timeframe: end of 2026) through parallel proof generation and network layer optimization, approaching the user experience of the Ethereum mainnet. This signifies that privacy networks are moving from "usable" to "high-performance." Killer app: zkPassport and the paradigm shift in compliance Technology itself is cold until it finds an application scenario that solves real human pain points. zkPassport is more accurately described as one of the identity verification/compliance signaling tools in the Noir ecosystem. Aztec uses its circuitry in its own scenarios to perform "minimal disclosure" compliance verification, such as sanctions list checks, thereby exploring a compromise between privacy and compliance. From data collection to fact verification Traditional KYC (Know Your Customer) processes require users to upload passport photos and identification documents to centralized servers. This is not only cumbersome but also creates countless vulnerable data honeypots. zkPassport completely overturns this logic: it utilizes the NFC chip embedded in modern e-passports and government digital signatures to read and verify identity information locally through physical contact between the phone and the passport. The Noir circuit then generates zero-knowledge proofs in the user's local environment. Users can prove to applications that they are "over 18 years old," "belong to the permitted list/not on the prohibited jurisdiction list," and "have not been hit by sanctions checks," without revealing details such as their full date of birth or passport number. Protection against witch attacks and institutional access zkPassport's significance extends far beyond identity verification. By generating passport-based anonymous identifiers, it provides a robust "Sybil Resistance" tool for DAO governance and airdrop distribution, ensuring the fairness of "one person, one vote" while preventing the possibility of reverse-tracking users' real identities. In practice, these verifiable, minimally disclosed compliance signals are expected to reduce compliance friction for institutions participating in on-chain finance, but they are not equivalent to a complete KYC/AML process. Institutions can prove their compliance qualifications through zkPassport, participating in on-chain financial activities without exposing their trading strategies and fund sizes. Aztec demonstrates through this application that compliance does not necessarily mean creating a panopticon; technology can simultaneously meet regulatory requirements and protect personal privacy. Economic Model: Continuous Liquidation Auction (CCA) and Fair Distribution As fuel for decentralized networks, the issuance mechanism of the native token AZTEC itself reflects the project team's extreme pursuit of fairness. Aztec abandons the traditional issuance model that easily leads to sniping and gas fee wars, and in collaboration with Uniswap Labs, introduces the innovative "Continuous Clearing Auction (CCA)". Price discovery and anti-MEV The CCA (Clearing and Settling) mechanism allows the market to fully engage in competition within a set time window to discover the true price. During each CCA clearing cycle, trades are settled at a uniform clearing price, thereby reducing front-running and gas bidding. This mechanism effectively eliminates the profit margin for front-runners, allowing retail investors to compete on a level playing field with whales. Liquidity of the protocol What's even more innovative is that CCA achieves an automated closed loop for issuance and liquidity establishment. The auction contract can automatically inject (partial) auction procedures and tokens into the Uniswap v4 liquidity pool according to pre-disclosed parameters, forming an on-chain verifiable "issuance → liquidity" closed loop. This means that the AZTEC token has had ample on-chain liquidity from its inception, avoiding the dramatic price swings common in new coin listings and protecting the interests of early community participants. This more DeFi-native approach to issuance and liquidity bootstrapping is often used to illustrate a type of implementation path where AMMs can expand from "trading infrastructure" to "issuance infrastructure." Conclusion: Building the "HTTPS Era" of Web3 Aztec Network's ecosystem, from the underlying Noir language standard to the upper-layer zkPassport application and the Ignition Chain network, is transforming the Ethereum community's long-held vision of "HTTPS upgrade" into a usable engineering reality. This is not an isolated technical experiment, but rather echoes Ethereum-native initiatives such as Kohaku and ZKnox, jointly building a layered privacy defense system from hardware to applications. If the early development of blockchain established trustless value settlement, then the next core theme will be establishing data autonomy and confidentiality. In this process, Aztec plays a crucial infrastructure role: it doesn't attempt to replace Ethereum's transparency, but rather completes the puzzle with "programmable privacy." As the technology matures and compliance frameworks improve, we can expect a future where privacy is no longer an "additional feature" but a "default attribute"—a "private world computer" that retains the verifiability of the public ledger while respecting individual digital boundaries.Author: Zhixiong Pan In the second decade of blockchain technology development, the industry is facing a fundamental philosophical and technological paradox: while Ethereum, as a "world computer," has successfully established a trustless value settlement layer, its radical transparency is becoming an obstacle to widespread adoption. Currently, every interaction, asset allocation, salary transfer, and even social relationship among on-chain users is exposed to a permanently immutable public panoramic prison. This "glass house"-like existence not only infringes on individual sovereignty but also excludes the vast majority of institutional capital due to the lack of trade secret protection. 2025 marks a decisive turning point in industry consensus. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin explicitly stated that "privacy is not a function, but a health measure," defining it as the foundation of freedom and a necessary condition for social order. Just as the evolution of the internet from plaintext HTTP to encrypted HTTPS spurred the boom in e-commerce, Web3 is at a similar tipping point. Backed by approximately $119 million in funding, Aztec Network (the Ignition architecture) is driving Ethereum towards an infrastructure upgrade towards programmable privacy through Ignition Chain, the Noir language ecosystem, and Noir-based proof applications like zkPassport. Macro Narrative: From Single-Point Breakthroughs to the Depth of "Overall Privacy" Defense The Ethereum ecosystem's understanding of privacy has evolved beyond a single coin mixing protocol into a "Holistic Privacy" architecture that spans the network, hardware, and application layers. This paradigm shift became a focal point at the 2025 Devconnect conference, establishing that privacy protection must possess full-stack defense depth. Refactoring Software Standards: Kohaku and Stealth Metaaddresses The Kohaku reference implementation, led by the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy Exploration Team (PSE), marks the transition of privacy technology from a "wild plugin" to a "legitimate force." Kohaku is more than just a wallet SDK; it attempts to fundamentally restructure the account system. By introducing the "Stealth Meta-Address" mechanism, Kohaku allows the recipient to publish only a static meta-public key, while the sender generates a unique, one-time on-chain address for each transaction based on elliptic curve cryptography. To external observers, these transactions appear as if they were sent to a random black hole, making it impossible to establish a correlation with the user's true identity. Furthermore, Kohaku provides reusable integration components around mechanisms such as stealth meta-addresses and stealth addresses, attempting to move privacy capabilities from "plug-ins" to a more standardized wallet infrastructure. The Last Bastion of Hardware Defense: ZKnox and the Quantum Threat If Kohaku safeguards the logic at the software level, then ZKnox, an Ethereum Foundation (EF)-funded project that fills the hardware gaps in the ecosystem, focuses on addressing deeper key security and future threats. With the increasing prevalence of ZK applications, more and more sensitive witnesses (potentially containing key materials, identity data, or transaction details) need to participate in the proof and signature process on the terminal side, thus expanding the risk of leakage when clients are compromised. ZKnox focuses more on improving and implementing the infrastructure to make quantum-resistant cryptography "usable and inexpensive" on Ethereum (e.g., promoting related pre-compilations to reduce the computational cost of lattice cryptography), paving the way for future migration to PQ signature schemes. More importantly, in the face of the potential threat that quantum computing may pose to traditional elliptic curve cryptography in the 2030s, ZKnox is focusing on infrastructure work to make quantum-resistant cryptography available and cheap enough on Ethereum. For example, EIP-7885 proposes to add NTT pre-compilation to reduce the on-chain verification cost of lattice cryptography (including schemes such as Falcon) and pave the way for future PQ migration. Aztec's historical standing and technological architecture: Defining the "Private World Computer" In the evolution of the privacy field, Aztec occupies a unique niche. Unlike the pseudonym mechanism of the Bitcoin era, and surpassing the single "transactional privacy" offered by Zcash or Tornado Cash, Aztec is committed to achieving Turing-complete "programmable privacy." Its core team includes the co-inventors of the PLONK zero-knowledge proof system, which gives Aztec a deep-rooted ability for original cryptographic innovation. Hybrid State Model: Breaking the Impossible Triangle The biggest challenge in building a privacy-preserving smart contract platform lies in how to handle state. Traditional blockchains are either entirely public state (like Ethereum) or entirely private state (like Zcash). Aztec creatively proposes a hybrid state model: at the private level, it adopts a Bitcoin-like UTXO model, storing user assets and data as encrypted "Notes". These tickets are marked "spent/expired" by generating corresponding nullifiers, thus preventing double-spending and maintaining privacy regarding ticket content and ownership. At the public level, Aztec maintains publicly verifiable public state, which is updated by public functions in the network-side public execution environment. This architecture allows developers to mix private and public functions within the same smart contract. For example, a decentralized voting application can expose the global state of "total votes," but keep "who voted" and "what voted" strictly confidential through private state. Dual Execution Model: A Harmony of PXE and AVM Aztec's execution is split into two layers: client and network. Private functions are executed in the client's PXE and generate proofs and commitments related to the private state. Public state transitions are executed by the sequencer (running a public execution environment/VM) and generate (or delegate to the prover network to generate) proofs of validity that can be verified on Ethereum. Client-Side Proving: All private data processing occurs within the user's local Private Execution Environment (PXE). Whether generating transactions or computing logic, the user's private key and plaintext data never leave their device. The PXE is responsible for running the circuit locally and generating a zero-knowledge proof. Public Execution and Verification (AVM): Users only submit the generated proofs to the network. On the network side, the sorter/block-producing committee verifies the private proofs and re-executes the public parts during the packaging process. The public contract logic is executed in the AVM and incorporated into the final validity proof that can be verified on Ethereum. This separation of "private inputs on the client and public state transitions verifiable" compresses the conflict between privacy and verifiability within the boundaries of the provable interface, without requiring the entire network to see all plaintext data. Interoperability and Cross-Layer Communication: Portals and Asynchronous Message Passing Under the Ignition architecture, Aztec does not treat Ethereum as a "background execution engine" to proxy the execution of DeFi instructions. Instead, it establishes an L1↔L2 communication abstraction through Portals. Since private execution needs to be "prepared and proven" in advance on the client side, and public state modification must be executed by the sequencer at the chain head, Aztec's cross-domain calls are designed as a one-way, asynchronous message passing model: L2 contracts can initiate call intentions to the L1 portal (or vice versa), and the message becomes consumable in subsequent blocks through the rollup mechanism. Applications need to explicitly handle failure and rollback scenarios. Rollup contracts take on key responsibilities such as maintaining the state root, verifying state transition proofs, and moving message queue states, thereby enabling composable interactions with Ethereum while maintaining privacy constraints. Strategic Engine: Noir Language and the Democratization of Zero-Knowledge Development If Ignition Chain is the body of Aztec, then the Noir language is its soul. For a long time, the development of zero-knowledge proof applications was limited by the "two-brain problem," requiring developers to be both seasoned cryptographers and skilled engineers, manually translating business logic into low-level arithmetic circuits and polynomial constraints. This was not only inefficient but also highly prone to introducing security vulnerabilities. The power of abstraction is independent of the backend. Noir emerged to end this "Tower of Babel" era. As an open-source domain-specific language (DSL), Noir employs a modern syntax similar to Rust, supporting advanced features such as loops, structs, and function calls. According to a developer report from Electric Capital, writing complex logic in Noir requires only one-tenth the amount of code compared to traditional circuit languages (such as Halo2 or Circom). For example, after migrating to Noir, Payy's privacy payment network reduced its core codebase from thousands of lines to approximately 250 lines. More strategically significant is Noir's "Backend Agnosticism." Noir code compiles to an intermediate representation layer (ACIR), which can interface with any proof system that supports the standard. Noir decouples circuit representation from specific proof systems through ACIR: it comes with Barretenberg by default within the Aztec protocol stack, while ACIR can also be converted/adapted to different backends such as Groth16 outside the chain or in other systems. This flexibility makes Noir a universal standard in the entire ZK field, breaking down barriers between different ecosystems. Ecosystem Explosion and Developer Moats Data proves the success of the Noir strategy. In Electric Capital's annual report, the Aztec/Noir ecosystem has ranked among the top five fastest-growing ecosystems for developers across the industry for two consecutive years. Currently, more than 600 projects on GitHub are built using Noir, covering everything from authentication (zkEmail) and games to complex DeFi protocols. By hosting the NoirCon global developer conference, Aztec has not only solidified its technological moat but also fostered a vibrant ecosystem of privacy-focused native applications, foreshadowing a Cambrian explosion in privacy applications. Network Cornerstone: Decentralized Practices of Ignition Chain In November 2025, Aztec launched Ignition Chain on the Ethereum mainnet (currently focusing on decentralized block generation and proof processes, with transactions and contract execution expected to be gradually opened in early 2026). This is not only a technological milestone, but also a radical practice of Layer 2 decentralization. The courage to start with decentralization In the current Layer 2 scaling race, most networks (such as Optimism and Arbitrum) rely on a single centralized sequencer in the early stages to ensure performance, postponing decentralization to an uncertain future. Aztec chose a completely different path: Ignition Chain operated from the outset with a decentralized validator/orderer committee architecture, and delegated key permissions to an open set of validators as much as possible. The network triggered genesis block production after the validator queue reached a startup threshold of 500, and attracted 600+ validators to join and participate in the block production and endorsement process in the early stages after its launch. This design is not superfluous; it is the bottom line for the survival of privacy networks. If the sorter is centralized, regulatory agencies or powerful bodies can easily pressure it to review or reject privacy transactions from specific addresses, rendering the entire privacy network ineffective. The decentralized sorter/committee design eliminates the single point of censorship by a single sorter and significantly improves the censorship resistance of packaged transactions, assuming the existence of honest participants and the validity of the protocol assumptions. Performance Roadmap While decentralization brings security, it also presents performance challenges. Currently, Ignition Chain's block generation time is approximately 36-72 seconds. Aztec's roadmap aims to gradually compress the current long block interval to around 3-4 seconds (target timeframe: end of 2026) through parallel proof generation and network layer optimization, approaching the user experience of the Ethereum mainnet. This signifies that privacy networks are moving from "usable" to "high-performance." Killer app: zkPassport and the paradigm shift in compliance Technology itself is cold until it finds an application scenario that solves real human pain points. zkPassport is more accurately described as one of the identity verification/compliance signaling tools in the Noir ecosystem. Aztec uses its circuitry in its own scenarios to perform "minimal disclosure" compliance verification, such as sanctions list checks, thereby exploring a compromise between privacy and compliance. From data collection to fact verification Traditional KYC (Know Your Customer) processes require users to upload passport photos and identification documents to centralized servers. This is not only cumbersome but also creates countless vulnerable data honeypots. zkPassport completely overturns this logic: it utilizes the NFC chip embedded in modern e-passports and government digital signatures to read and verify identity information locally through physical contact between the phone and the passport. The Noir circuit then generates zero-knowledge proofs in the user's local environment. Users can prove to applications that they are "over 18 years old," "belong to the permitted list/not on the prohibited jurisdiction list," and "have not been hit by sanctions checks," without revealing details such as their full date of birth or passport number. Protection against witch attacks and institutional access zkPassport's significance extends far beyond identity verification. By generating passport-based anonymous identifiers, it provides a robust "Sybil Resistance" tool for DAO governance and airdrop distribution, ensuring the fairness of "one person, one vote" while preventing the possibility of reverse-tracking users' real identities. In practice, these verifiable, minimally disclosed compliance signals are expected to reduce compliance friction for institutions participating in on-chain finance, but they are not equivalent to a complete KYC/AML process. Institutions can prove their compliance qualifications through zkPassport, participating in on-chain financial activities without exposing their trading strategies and fund sizes. Aztec demonstrates through this application that compliance does not necessarily mean creating a panopticon; technology can simultaneously meet regulatory requirements and protect personal privacy. Economic Model: Continuous Liquidation Auction (CCA) and Fair Distribution As fuel for decentralized networks, the issuance mechanism of the native token AZTEC itself reflects the project team's extreme pursuit of fairness. Aztec abandons the traditional issuance model that easily leads to sniping and gas fee wars, and in collaboration with Uniswap Labs, introduces the innovative "Continuous Clearing Auction (CCA)". Price discovery and anti-MEV The CCA (Clearing and Settling) mechanism allows the market to fully engage in competition within a set time window to discover the true price. During each CCA clearing cycle, trades are settled at a uniform clearing price, thereby reducing front-running and gas bidding. This mechanism effectively eliminates the profit margin for front-runners, allowing retail investors to compete on a level playing field with whales. Liquidity of the protocol What's even more innovative is that CCA achieves an automated closed loop for issuance and liquidity establishment. The auction contract can automatically inject (partial) auction procedures and tokens into the Uniswap v4 liquidity pool according to pre-disclosed parameters, forming an on-chain verifiable "issuance → liquidity" closed loop. This means that the AZTEC token has had ample on-chain liquidity from its inception, avoiding the dramatic price swings common in new coin listings and protecting the interests of early community participants. This more DeFi-native approach to issuance and liquidity bootstrapping is often used to illustrate a type of implementation path where AMMs can expand from "trading infrastructure" to "issuance infrastructure." Conclusion: Building the "HTTPS Era" of Web3 Aztec Network's ecosystem, from the underlying Noir language standard to the upper-layer zkPassport application and the Ignition Chain network, is transforming the Ethereum community's long-held vision of "HTTPS upgrade" into a usable engineering reality. This is not an isolated technical experiment, but rather echoes Ethereum-native initiatives such as Kohaku and ZKnox, jointly building a layered privacy defense system from hardware to applications. If the early development of blockchain established trustless value settlement, then the next core theme will be establishing data autonomy and confidentiality. In this process, Aztec plays a crucial infrastructure role: it doesn't attempt to replace Ethereum's transparency, but rather completes the puzzle with "programmable privacy." As the technology matures and compliance frameworks improve, we can expect a future where privacy is no longer an "additional feature" but a "default attribute"—a "private world computer" that retains the verifiability of the public ledger while respecting individual digital boundaries.