ConsenSys Labs leads investment into AZTEC

ConsenSys’ Ethereum incubator, ConsenSys Labs, has led a $2.1 million seed investment into AZTEC.

Other investors in the round included Entrepreneur First, Samos Investments, Jeffrey Tarrant (Mov37) and Charlie Songhurst.

AZTEC was founded by Dr. Zachary Williamson and Tom Pocock. It says that it uses zero knowledge proofs to “allow transactions to be fully executed through the Ethereum mainnet while retaining bank-level privacy for users”.

“ConsenSys is proud to support this breakthrough from AZTEC and CreditMint, bringing zk-SNARKs-based privacy, confidentiality and scalability to a wide variety of asset transactions on public Ethereum,” says Joe Lubin, Co-creator of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys.

“Ethereum is currently the only viable platform for rigourously trustworthy digital assets in a broad spectrum of forms, and AZTEC takes this to the next level with an important new protocol that Ethereum developers can configure for a variety of use cases.”

The smart contracts underpinning AZTEC’s private transactions have been temporarily released under copyright at AztecProtocol.com, and will subsequently be released under a permissive licence to build AZTEC into an open source decentralised exchange.

The venture is currently raising additional funds to build out the protocol to provide on-chain privacy for all transactions. An academic paper can be found here.