04-07, 12:30–12:50 (Europe/Zurich), Surge Stage
Privacy in a distributed ledger is a hard thing to do. Not only it needs to be redesigned, but it also involves big changes in the concept of wallet.
Instead of holding keys and signing, a wallet will actually be a powerful executor, a database of UTXOs, a server.
In this talk we will go over Aztec’s approach to private execution, focusing on its privacy workhorse, the PXE.
Cypherpunks wanted a world where cryptography could take over the role of trust in the unknown.
Blockchain is one such interesting experience, and wallets in particular are the gateway to distributed ledgers and computation. But it all relies on everyone needing to see and compute everything, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide any privacy.
The succintness that comes with SNARKs allows for only some people proving state change and a quick verification. But still, everyone needs to see everything in order to verify it.
The only way to retain privacy is to execute transactions on the client-side. You run your own execution environment, you control your private inputs, you generate your proof.
Next-gen wallets are coming, and they won’t look like normal wallets.
I'm enjoying exploring the "unknown unknown" as a DevRel engineer at Aztec. As a weird engineer with an even weirder background as a musician and teacher, I'm passionate about the future of ZK and how can it made accessible without needing a PhD in math