Aztec Network

A privacy-first layer 2 on Ethereum whose smart contracts can keep state in encrypted notes and run private functions on the user's own device, running as alpha software since 2026.

AlphaPrivacy layer 2

Aztec describes the network as alpha software: Alpha V5 went live on 21 July 2026, and since 7 August 2026 Aztec has told users to treat funds and applications on V5 as exposed to a protocol-level failure until V6, planned for later in 2026, closes a critical proving-system flaw.

Launched: 19 Nov 2025
Token: AZTEC
Chains: Ethereum

Checked on 23 Oct 2026. Information only, not investment advice.

How it works

Aztec is a layer 2 network, a zero-knowledge rollup, that settles to Ethereum: batches of Aztec transactions are proven correct and the proofs are checked by Aztec's rollup contract on Ethereum. Unlike most layer 2s it is not compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Its smart contracts are written in Noir, a language for zero-knowledge programs, and can combine private and public functions and state. Private state is held as notes, encrypted records that only their owner can decrypt, kept in an append-only tree; using up a note publishes a nullifier, which marks it as spent without revealing which note it was. Private functions run on the user's own device, in the Private Execution Environment (PXE), which holds the user's keys and notes and produces a zero-knowledge proof that the function ran correctly, so the network receives the proof and the resulting commitments and nullifiers rather than the inputs. Public functions run on the network in the Aztec Virtual Machine, openly, like ordinary smart contracts; a private function can queue a public one, but not the other way round. Every account is a smart contract, with separate keys for nullifiers and for reading incoming and outgoing notes.

The network is run by sequencers that stake the AZTEC token, 200,000 tokens each, and Aztec said in June 2026 that more than 3,500 were running it. A rotating committee of sequencers checks each proposed block, re-executing its public transactions and verifying its private proofs, and two thirds of the committee plus one must sign it before it is published to Ethereum; provers then produce the rollup proofs that the contract on Ethereum verifies. Fees are paid in Fee Juice, which is obtained by bridging AZTEC from Ethereum and can be paid privately. Aztec is upgraded by moving to a new rollup instance approved through on-chain governance: the Ignition Chain began producing blocks on Ethereum mainnet on 19 November 2025 without running user contracts, the Alpha rollup (version 4) became canonical after a governance vote whose execution delay ended on 30 March 2026, and Alpha V5 followed on 21 July 2026, cutting average block time from 14 to 6 seconds and, according to Aztec, the cost of a fully private token transfer to under $0.05. PriFi.info's Activity page charts the number of transactions in Aztec blocks each day, as the Aztecscan explorer reports them.

Some things stay visible. Any call from a private function to a public one is public, with its arguments, as are public functions, public state and public logs; note hashes, nullifiers and private logs are padded to hide how many a transaction creates, but the number of public calls and of messages to Ethereum still shows. Tokens enter and leave Aztec through bridge contracts on Ethereum, where deposits and withdrawals are ordinary public transactions. Fees paid with Fee Juice directly or through a sponsored fee-paying contract are public methods in Aztec's documentation, while some fee-paying contracts route payments through private notes, so that fees paid through the same contract join one larger privacy set. Any query a wallet makes to a node reveals information to whoever runs that node. Aztec calls the network alpha software, and since 7 August 2026 it has told users to treat funds and applications on V5 as exposed to a protocol-level failure.

Token

AZTEC AZTEC is a token on Ethereum, with a total supply of about 10.35 billion according to exchange listings, that sequencers stake (200,000 each) to run the network, that staked holders use to vote on upgrades and that, bridged to the network as Fee Juice, pays transaction fees; it became transferable and began trading on 12 Feb 2026 after a token-holder vote.

Team and governance

Aztec was built by Aztec Labs, the company co-founded by Zac Williamson and Joe Andrews that raised Aztec's venture funding from 2018 to 2022 and also develops the Noir language and the Barretenberg proving library; the Aztec Foundation, for which Zac Williamson spoke at the V5 release, now represents the network. The protocol is changed through on-chain governance: sequencers signal for a proposal (600 of 1,000), then holders who stake vote, with a quorum of 100 million AZTEC and a two-thirds majority, and since the Alpha upgrade a 30-day delay before execution. Aztec said in January 2026 that its Labs and Foundation teams and its investors could not stake or vote for 12 months and that their tokens stay locked for a year and then unlock over two more.

TVL and market cap

Aztec Network has no chart on this site. It is not in the protocol list, whose TVL figures come from DefiLlama, and its token, AZTEC, is not in the privacy-coin basket, whose market caps come from Coin Metrics, so PriFi.info holds no daily series for it. The value held in private balances on a privacy network is encrypted, so it cannot be measured from public data; the Watchlist explains why such networks are not counted in the site's figures.

What it hides and what it does not

What it hides

Balances and other private state, held in notes encrypted for their owner, and which notes a transaction spends.
The inputs and logic of private functions, which run and are proven on the user's own device, and the contracts called from private code.
The true number of note hashes, nullifiers and private logs in a transaction, which are padded.

What it does not hide

Every call from private to public code, with its arguments, and all public functions, state and logs.
How many public function calls and messages to Ethereum a transaction makes.
Deposits and withdrawals through the bridge contracts on Ethereum, which are public transactions there.
Fees paid with Fee Juice directly or through a sponsored fee-paying contract, which the documentation lists as public methods.
Whatever a wallet's queries reveal to the node that answers them, and the timing of transactions.

Drawn from how it works, above; the sources are listed at the end of the page. Where privacy still leaks explains the patterns, such as timing and amounts, that can give users of any design away.

Audits

Four security reviews, oldest first, with what each covered and found. Dates are when each report was issued, unless the entry says otherwise.

Date	Firm	Scope and findings
8 Apr 2019	ConsenSys Diligence	The smart contract system of the original AZTEC protocol for confidential transactions on Ethereum, an earlier design than today's network, at an early commit; the zero-knowledge constructions were out of scope, and the report says the code changed significantly afterwards. Source: AZTEC Protocol audit report, April 2019 GitHub (ConsenSysDiligence), 8 Apr 2019
Not dated	Solidified	External smart contract audit of Aztec Connect, Aztec's earlier privacy rollup, named in Aztec's May 2022 bug bounty post alongside a review by Sentnl and internal audits; the same post said no cryptography audit had been done, because Aztec had not found a firm with the expertise. Source: Aztec Network raises total bug bounty to $2 million Aztec, 20 May 2022
18 Sep 2025	Veridise	The Bigfield library in Barretenberg, Aztec's proving library, reviewed from 14 July to 1 August 2025 over 9 person-weeks; no findings. Sources: Aztec: Bigfield audit report Veridise, 18 Sep 2025; Find out why Aztec chose us for crypto security Veridise
7 Aug 2026	Internal and external reviewers (not named)	Aztec said that internal and external human audits of Alpha V5 had been completed and that AI-assisted auditing continues, and that its bug bounty on Cantina had drawn more than 234 security researchers; it has not named the firms or published the V5 reports. The date is that of the post. Sources: Alpha V5 Proving System Vulnerability Aztec, 7 Aug 2026; Introducing Alpha V5 Aztec, 21 Jul 2026

Incidents

Three incidents, oldest first: flaws, exploits, sanctions, prosecutions and other events that affected the project or its users.

17 Mar 2026

Aztec's team found a critical vulnerability in the proving system of Alpha (version 4), which it said could lead to severe disruption and theft of user funds and was not caught by validators re-executing the public parts of transactions. Aztec disclosed it on 27 March 2026 without details, asked apps and bridges to warn users not to deposit funds they could not afford to lose, asked nodes to upgrade to version 4.1.2 for a separate flaw that let incorrect proofs into the mempool, and fixed it in V5.

Sources: Critical Vulnerability in Alpha v4 Aztec, 27 Mar 2026; Aztec urges V4 users to withdraw funds before June 25 as V5 upgrade approaches The Defiant; Introducing Alpha V5 Aztec, 21 Jul 2026
14 Jun 2026

Exploit

An attacker exploited the deprecated Aztec Connect RollupProcessor contract on Ethereum, which still held funds after the 2024 shutdown, through a gap between the transactions it settled and those covered by the proof's public inputs, minting balances and withdrawing about $2.19 million in one transaction, according to SlowMist. The current Aztec network was not involved.

Sources: Analysis of the $2.19 Million Asset Theft from Aztec Connect: ZK-Rollup Settlement Boundary Bypass Leads to L1/L2 State Discrepancy SlowMist (Medium), 15 Jun 2026; Transaction draining the Aztec Connect RollupProcessor (block 25315715) Blockscout (Ethereum), 14 Jun 2026
27 Jul 2026

Core contributors found, through AI-assisted auditing, a critical flaw in the V5 proving system that could let a crafted proof pass verification for a transaction the network should reject, putting V5 funds, applications and contract state at risk. Aztec disclosed it on 7 August 2026, said it could not determine whether anyone had exploited it, asked teams to pause new V5 deployments and planned the fix for V6, later in 2026.

Sources: Alpha V5 Proving System Vulnerability Aztec, 7 Aug 2026; Post-Quantum Aztec Aztec, 15 Oct 2026

Milestones

Nine milestones, oldest first.

16 Dec 2021
Aztec Labs announced a $17 million Series A led by Paradigm, saying its first product, the private transfer app zk.money, had more than 20,000 registered users.
Source: Aztec Network raises $17 million Series A from Paradigm to bring programmable privacy to Web3 Aztec, 16 Dec 2021
13 Mar 2023
Aztec Labs announced the sunset of Aztec Connect, its earlier privacy rollup: its documentation gives 21 March 2023 as the day the rollup stopped accepting deposits, and Aztec kept processing withdrawals until 31 March 2024, when it stopped running the sequencer.
Sources: Sunsetting Aztec Connect Aztec Labs (The Aztec Labs Blog on Medium), 13 Mar 2023; Aztec Connect Sunset Aztec documentation; Aztec Connect Sunset Aztec forum
May 2025
Aztec opened its public testnet.
Source: Aztec launches privacy-focused L2 Ignition Chain on mainnet following token sale The Block, 19 Nov 2025
19 Nov 2025
The Ignition Chain went live on Ethereum mainnet: block production started once 500 validators, each staking 200,000 AZTEC, had joined the queue, but the chain did not yet run user contracts.
Sources: Aztec launches privacy-focused L2 Ignition Chain on mainnet following token sale The Block, 19 Nov 2025; Aztec launches 'actually decentralized' and private ETH L2 mainnet (almost) Cointelegraph
6 Dec 2025
The AZTEC token sale on Ethereum closed with 19,476 ETH raised from more than 16,700 participants, about half of the committed capital coming from the community, according to Aztec.
Source: Aztec TGE: next steps Aztec, 6 Dec 2025
12 Feb 2026
After a token-holder vote on the token generation event, AZTEC bought in the sale became transferable and trading opened, with listings on Kraken and other exchanges.
Sources: The Aztec TGE vote: what you need to know Aztec, 22 Jan 2026; AZTEC is available for trading Kraken, 12 Feb 2026; HTX Opens Trading for AZTEC (Aztec Network) HTX via Newsfile, 12 Feb 2026
30 Mar 2026
The execution delay ended on a governance proposal that made the Alpha rollup (version 4), with new circuits, blob data and a 30-day delay for later upgrades, the canonical Aztec network; The Defiant reported that Alpha went live with private smart contracts and with warnings of known critical vulnerabilities.
Sources: Alpha Upgrade for node operators (v4 from v2) Aztec forum, 19 Mar 2026; Aztec Launches Alpha Network, Ethereum's First L2 for Private Smart Contracts The Defiant
21 Jul 2026
Alpha V5, passed by token-holder governance, went live, cutting average block time from 14 to 6 seconds and the proving time of a private transfer on a laptop from 5.2 to about 2.5 seconds, with apps including Nyx for private yield on Aave, the Azguard and Nethermind wallets, the Shield and TRAIN bridges and RavenHouse, a private NFT collection.
Sources: Introducing Alpha V5 Aztec, 21 Jul 2026; How Gas Works on Aztec Aztec, 22 Jul 2026
15 Oct 2026
Aztec published a post-quantum roadmap, with hardened libraries against harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks targeted for February 2027 and a full migration of the proving system, addresses, signatures and settlement for 2030, and said critical vulnerabilities found by its AI audit tooling were patched in the coming V6 release.
Source: Post-Quantum Aztec Aztec, 15 Oct 2026

Funding

Four sources of funding, oldest first. Amounts are in US dollars; a dash means the sources give no US dollar figure.

Date	Round	Amount	Investors
29 Nov 2018	Seed round for the original AZTEC protocol, reported as $2.1 million from ConsenSys Labs, with Entrepreneur First and Samos Investments also taking part (it is not clear whether the figure is the whole round or ConsenSys Labs' share) Source: ConsenSys Invests $2.1 Mln in Startup That Will Make ETH Transactions Private U.Today, 29 Nov 2018	$2.1M	ConsenSys Labs, Entrepreneur First, Samos Investments
16 Dec 2021	Series A, led by Paradigm, with existing backers and angel investors Source: Aztec Network raises $17 million Series A from Paradigm to bring programmable privacy to Web3 Aztec, 16 Dec 2021	$17M	Paradigm
15 Dec 2022	Series B, led by a16z crypto, to double a team of 40 (reported by the press; valuation not disclosed) Sources: a16z leads $100 million raise for web3 privacy firm Aztec Network The Block; Ethereum-focused Aztec Network collects $100m in its Series B FinTech Global, 21 Dec 2022	$100M	a16z crypto, A Capital, King River, Variant, SV Angel, HashKey, Fenbushi, AVG
6 Dec 2025	Public sale of AZTEC tokens on Ethereum from 2 to 6 December 2025, which raised 19,476 ETH from more than 16,700 participants; the US dollar figure is The Block's conversion at the time Sources: Aztec TGE: next steps Aztec, 6 Dec 2025; Aztec Network raises over $60 million in ETH with community-first token sale, testing new auction model The Block, 7 Dec 2025	$61.3M	–

Risks

Aztec is alpha software, and its proving system was found to hold a critical flaw twice in 2026: one found on 17 March in version 4, which went live with the flaw known and undisclosed until V5 fixed it, and one found on 27 July in V5 that could let a crafted proof pass for a transaction the network should reject. Aztec says it cannot tell from the chain whether that flaw was exploited and that V6, planned for later in 2026, is needed to close it, and its audit reports for V5 have not been published. The cryptography is new, and Aztec's post-quantum roadmap of 15 October 2026 says no part of the network is fully quantum-proof, with a full migration targeted for 2030. Privacy depends on how each contract is written, because any call from private to public code exposes its arguments, and on how many people use the network, while deposits and withdrawals through the Ethereum bridges are public and can be matched by amount and timing. Upgrades replace the rollup through a vote of staked AZTEC, so the network's rules depend on its token holders and sequencers, and contracts left behind by earlier versions can still hold funds: the deprecated Aztec Connect contract lost about $2.19 million to an exploit in June 2026.