The show and guest
A Bankless podcast conversation with Aztec co-founder Zac Williamson. Original English title: The Race to Build the Private Ethereum.
Key points
- A race is taking shape around private smart contracts: Zcash is a private Bitcoin, private digital gold, while a private Ethereum would provide strong privacy guarantees on a smart-contract network with customizable assets 0:19
- Aztec says it is the only privacy chain other than Zcash without a backdoor: no centralized actor or third-party auditor can control or censor users, and private data, identities and credentials are available out of the box and composable 1:30
- The idea behind ZK Passport is to use digital passport signatures to verify identity without exposing personal information; identity verification need not mean handing over all personal information 6:57
- In the age of AI agents, the trusted-operator model is being eroded: old PHP code tucked away on a server in Utah manages orders, and now AI agents have time to dig into it. The internet’s model of “trusting websites by default” cannot hold up 23:07
- Blockchains are not immune to attack, but they were born in adversarial environments: Zcash’s circuits have been formally verified, and Aztec has formally verified most of its protocol. This hardening is happening faster than on the traditional internet 24:06
Background and notes
The subtitles cover 0:00–46:15. This article sets out the main points of the full 46-minute, 15-second conversation. The views and timestamps are paraphrased from the original subtitles; each timestamp marks the start of the corresponding segment of the original remarks.