With Aztec's Ignition Chain Launched, Will Ethereum Have Decentralized Privacy? - Ep. 958
Episode publishedPodcast: UnchainedUnchained
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We've been running kind of a test net for this since May and had 10,000 plus nodes on the test net, but doing it on Ethereum main net with real economics was, like, the final kind of, like, piece of the puzzle. So we're gonna run that, well, they're gonna run it for the next kind two, three months, and then early next year, they'll turn on transactions, and then the whole network will be live. Private World Confuser will be running, and you'll have privacy on Ethereum, which is kind of what we've all been waiting for.
Longer term, we want Astec to be the global exchange and settlements platform for the world's assets. Not digital assets, but all Nasdaq.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Before we get started, a quick reminder. Nothing you hear on Unchained is an investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guests and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit unchainedcrypto.com. Today's guests are Zach Williamson, cofounder of Astec Network, and Joe Andrews, cofounder of Astec Network. Zoom both of them. Both of them are cofounders. Welcome, Zach and Joe.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having us.
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Alright. So this has been something seven years in the making. So the Ignition Chain is the, production of Astec blocks, on the Ethereum mainnet. I should probably say what Astec is. Right? Yeah. So we are fully private, fully decentralized layer two on Ethereum, where we want to take the world's computer architecture that Ethereum created and add private information into it so that you can do private identities, private data, and have smart contract smart contracts that reason about that, effectively a private world computer. And Ignition is a major part of our rollout process where we have f
Yeah. So kind of launching decentralized, we we we wanted to do it in stages. And so the first stage of this is what we call Ignition. It's a bit like Ethereum's beacon chain. And so we've deployed the execution environment without transactions on Ethereum mainnet. The gas limit's effectively zero. And what it really is is the governance system behind Aztec running on Ethereum. So I think 1AM on Wednesday nights, we had 500 different kind of sequences around the world stake their tokens, and start block production. We also had four different proving entities. It's permissionless to come and pr
Wow. That's that's really cool. So explain what kinds of problems you were trying to solve with Ignition Chain.
I think it's one of the first times that an l two's fully decentralized. And so, some people kind of in the l two space have, like, pushed different aspects of decentralization. But for us, decentralization is kind of I think there's three parts to it. There's there's ownership of the network, like who owns and controls the network and its governance. There's who can produce blocks, normally sequencing, and then there's decentralized proving. And so we've run all three of those with kind of the the ignition chain. And as a result, when the execution environment lives, it will be a as goes live
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