Co-founder of Aztec Network. Building the Private World Computer. Cryptographer, software engineer, ex-particle physicist. Plonk co-author. Huff inventor.
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I'm very excited for this release. pure crypto rails, private payments via Aztec and zero data retention when routing. Very nice.
🔐 Introducing PrivateInference (PI)
🤔 What:
0 compromise private inference - wholesale or retail - one API key, one funded session, access to a universe of open and closed-weightg models from the leading labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic. No supplier accounts, no subscriptions. ✅
💭 Why:
1. Prompts have become highly sensitive data: unlike search queries, they can reveal reasoning, contracts, medical records, unreleased code, negotiations, and other confidential context. This information remains exposed on third-party servers during processing.
2. “Private inference” gets thrown around loosely: people normally think TEE - open weight models where execution is encrypted on the hardware level. Indeed, TEE can protect memory but a gateway still reads your prompt. Zero-retention policies constrain future use, not present visibility. Privacy is a chain — identity, payment, routing, and execution each need their own boundary, and a transaction is only as private as its weakest link.
⚙️ How:
🌐 Private settlement for tokens on Aztec mainnet (sender, recipient, amount never go onchain)
💳 One session funds many calls across models and inference providers
🔀 Provider routing with per-request zero data retention where supported
📅 When:
🟢 Live soon on the @aztecnetwork mainnet - settlement + session billing.
Next up: 🪪 conditional zkKYC (prove eligibility, not identity), blind routing, and an attested TEE execution tier with no fallback to a standard route if privacy can't be guaranteed.
Full article: nitter.net/GalacticaNet/status/21…
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Zac retweeted
Privacy is a spectrum, not a switch.
@GalacticaNet is stacking the full private inference chain - identity, settlement on @aztecnetwork, routing & soon TEE execution.
This is how AI stays private end-to-end. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
@base @jessepollak @aztecnetwork @Zac_Aztec @coinbase
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Very happy to see @afrazhaowang getting published in the New Yorker! A great article that dives into Chinese AI subcultures and the fascinating people driving them
My first piece for @NewYorker is out today!
As Xi Jinping lands in DC to start his state visit, you'll hear a lot about the US-China AI race. I'd like to tell a complementary AI story.
This past May, a few days after Trump visited Beijing, I went to the town people call China's vibe-coding capital, Liangzhu. There, you learn that China's AI scene is not monolithic. It's also full of contrarians, cool vibe coders, spiritual seekers, and people who love AI but refuse to join the 996 grind.
Liangzhu is on the edge of Hangzhou. I hung out with a group of anti-mainstream builders who use AI to make whimsical apps for fortune-telling, mental well-being, and creativity. Some of them run their lives entirely by bazi astrology (their founder almost became a Taoist monk). They meet on "Crazy Thursday" to vibe-code together. Rent is cheap, so they can get a bigger place with a living room to have friends over (unthinkable in Beijing or Shenzhen). In Liangzhu, they want to use AI to forge their own future.
It’s a ground-level story—less about model capabilities, hyperscalers, or AI policy, and more about how people in China are using AI, and the human stories behind it.
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Every time I leave an @aztecnetwork meeting, I leave hyped up, excited, and ready to show what’s coming next.
Aztec is privacy. Are you in?
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Zac retweeted
Your money is yours.
Keeping it safe shouldn't depend on you, or a single operator.
human.tech Wallet Protocol's Squid Mode keeps users and agents safe through protected self-custody.
Your money is yours.
Keeping it safe shouldn't depend on you getting everything right.
Protected self-custody is the human name for the security protocol behind WaaP Squid Mode that removes the single point of failure in wallets today.
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today I came to campus to share the privacy game @darkforest_eth with young friends
looking at the young faces in the audience
I was reminded that I once had a face just like theirs
I talked about the journey of Dark Forest's community-driven development (shout out to all @DFArchon community members)
and shared technical thoughts on porting it from EVM-compatible platform to the programmable privacy platform @aztecnetwork
I enjoy talking with young people
I like sharing with them the things I find interesting and wonderful
it makes me feel that I am passing on something good
hope this goodness can keep being passed on
🔐 前沿密码学与以太坊｜走进华东师大
ZK × FHE × Privacy × Ethereum
今天 14:00–17:00（GMT+8），我们将在上海华东师范大学普陀校区，与来自高校、密码学研究领域及 Ethereum 生态的研究者与开发者，共同探索前沿密码学与 Ethereum 的发展。
🎙️ Today’s Highlights
• ZK｜胡云聪，上海交通大学计算机学院
• 应用｜Xavier Xia，Primus
• FHE｜李保宇，上海交通大学
• 隐私｜ddy，DFArchon / Aztec
• Ethereum 生态｜Shyam Sridhar，Ethereum Foundation Academic Team（线上）
🤝 Co-hosts: 华东师范大学密码学院 、上海交大约翰-霍普克罗夫特计算科学中心 、
@PrimusLabs
🌐 社区合作伙伴:
@EthereumSH
@OpenBuildxyz
@GCCofCommons
@ETHPanda_Org
@LXDAO_Official
📍 上海｜华东师范大学普陀校区·孟刘馆二楼报告厅
🎥 线上直播
👉 [meet.google.com/uoa-yito-wvg]
无法到场？欢迎线上参与！
Starting soon. See you in Shanghai! 🔐⛓️
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When Vitalik says he isn’t giving up, I think of someone that has just spent half an hour writing three sentences, then sent them to the only person they felt able to tell.
I think of that person, and all the people who haven’t found the words yet, and I remember that the fight for privacy is a fight for dignity, a fight for choice, and a fight for freedom; the freedom to be wrong, the freedom to be ashamed, and the freedom to choose.
We must never forget how much ordinary life there is within this word and we must NEVER let them make us think otherwise.
It's only dead if you give up
I'm not giving up on privacy. I'm doubling down.
firefly.social/post/x/210138…
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Zac retweeted
privacy is barely getting started, @aztecnetwork is still in Alpha
privacy szn is coming 🛡️
It's only dead if you give up
I'm not giving up on privacy. I'm doubling down.
firefly.social/post/x/210138…
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Zac retweeted
the apps that check you're a real human make you prove it from scratch, every time
captcha here, wallet age there, some KYC form over there
how many times have you re-proven you're human this week? what if you did it once and carried it everywhere?
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This is a fight for the ages. If we don't bind privacy into mainstream products we're doomed to total information surveillance.
I've been doing this for 9 years and have no intention of giving up.
It's only dead if you give up
I'm not giving up on privacy. I'm doubling down.
firefly.social/post/x/210138…
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Zac retweeted
Fully decentralized ✅
Fully private ✅
Fully programmable public/private smart contracts ✅
If you care about privacy, you should care about Aztec.
Privacy szn always leads back to Aztec
Fully decentralized
Fully private
Fully programmable with public/private smart contracts
In alpha, but we've got some of the best teams in the space building and planning for upcoming stable releases
Couldn't be more excited for what's to come
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Zac retweeted
🚨 Alpha Friday is today!
3PM UTC, in Discord. Special guest @Zac_Aztec, CEO & Co-founder of @aztecnetwork - talking private settlement, agent payments, and what's next for privacy.
Don't miss it 👇
discord.com/channels/1051876…
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Zac retweeted
Our co-founder @Zac_Aztec will be there giving a talk on what programmable privacy entails at the system level! Hope to see you there!
If you're building anything that touches user data onchain, this is the @EFDevcon talk to sit in.
@Zac_Aztec will present what programmable privacy entails at the system level, from the perspective of the network that already shipped it.
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Zac retweeted
great piece by @lmatsakis
Dario seems to have persuaded neither Washington nor Beijing that AI could pose grave risks. Part of the gap may be political and relate to some fundamental ways of understanding the world. Politicians and AI researchers have very different ideas about where power lies, and what could escape their control.
But AI companies also have a communication problem. The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident is alarming once you understand what happened—but how can you explain to an auntie that this thing is actually dangerous and very different from computer worms???
My reading of “We Must Pace the Frontier” is that Dario is asking governments to help companies coordinate so safety work can keep up with AI development. That’s an enormous ask. If I were a politician without a technical background, I’d want a plain account of the what is the danger, the evidence, and exactly what I’m being asked to do—and why I should even listen.
Frontier labs are trying to communicate a sense of urgency that governments don’t yet share, and I’ve realized the cognitive Venn diagram between Silicon Valley’s frontier AI companies and Washington is still very small. AI companies need to spend time translating urgent warnings into language that’s understandable and common sense. And so far “AI hacking Hugging Face is dangerous” and “AI will kill us all” are neither commonsensical nor understandable.
for @WIRED I wrote about why China isn't buying Dario Amodei's call to pace the frontier globally wired.com/story/china-isnt-b…
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