Martin Verzilli

currently @AztecLabs_, previously @manastech, @CrystalLanguage
There's a bunch of things I love.

[Joseph Suarez 🐡 @jsuarez]

This post right here officer
Let me know when your engineers ship 8x LESS code

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

@boredGenius 😱😱😱 this is amazing

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

I'd rather read 2 or 3 words that you actually thought of putting together

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

Your data is yours 💪

[Aztec Labs @AztecLabs_]

Aztec Labs has acquired Obsidion, the team behind @ZKPassport.

The Obsidion team will continue to develop ZKPassport while also leading new consumer product developments.

The ZKPassport protocol will remain open source.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

1 million times this: our job is not to model, it is to write data. Yes sorry, it doesn’t sound as glamorous 🤷‍♂️

[Jonathan Blow @Jonathan_Blow]

@ShitanshuEngg You don’t need to “model systems”, you just need to implement functionality.

[Jonathan Blow @Jonathan_Blow]

@ShitanshuEngg You don’t need to “model systems”, you just need to implement functionality.

[Aztec @aztecnetwork]

AI proofs verified using our UltraHonk proving scheme.

Yet another way that privacy, authentication, and information security are coming together on Aztec.

[dax @thdxr]

the fundamental workflow of a coding agent is you start a chat and then you talk to it

every coding agent is trying to win users so they make up a new workflow and tell you it's more effective

doesn't matter if it is, only 1% of people will use it which is not enough to matter

the actual task is just to make long rambling sessions work well

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

@BuyerBlueprints

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

programming with agents is like making home made ghee

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

@housecor Whatever passes the tests

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

If this works and they leave, would this make them… miss Anthropic?

[Theo - t3.gg @theo]

A letter to my friends at Anthropic

I hate that I feel obligated to do this. I hate that I've had to be so harsh towards Anthropic for the past few months. I really, really don't want to. I know it might feel like I'm doing this for clicks or something, but I promise I'm not.

My pro-Anthropic content ALWAYS outperforms my anti-Anthropic content. I have cost myself a lot of money, opportunities, sponsors, and more.

I'm doing this because you work for an evil cult. I'm begging you to wake up.

Your CEO, Dario, does not respect engineers. This is obvious. He couldn't make it more obvious if he tried (and I think he's trying pretty hard)

You know this, but you don't want to acknowledge it. It has kept you up many nights. You know that bad code is shipping to users. You know that one bad tweet might get you fired. You fear for your vesting schedules. You're afraid.

Nobody deserves what you're going through right now. You go to work afraid, you leave work afraid, and you go to YouTube to keep up on the dev world, just to hear me yelling all about how evil your company is.

You deserve better. You might not feel like you do, but you know deep down that this isn't right.

I hope you know how deeply I feel for you. I'm sorry. I know I haven't helped you much individually, and I want to be better about this.

If you're ready to leave, please hit me up. I swear I'll never tell a soul. I have friends at every lab and most startups in the AI world. Most of them would be down to match your current vesting schedules, possibly even go beyond.

If you're staying for the money, I beg you to hit me up. We can make the money happen somewhere that hates you less.

I know I'm asking for a lot of trust here, and that you're scared after seeing how hard I've been on Anthropic. I can't blame you at all for that. I should have posted something like this months ago. That's my failure to own and I will own it to my best ability.

If you're willing to trust me in this moment, I can make it right. Let me help you escape. You deserve to work somewhere that you can have impact. Somewhere that listens when you feel something is wrong. Somewhere that won't fire you when you point out the things that hurt your users.

My DMs are always open to you. When you're ready, let me know. I promise to make it right.

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

@Aella_Girl Fixed point? ~80% of people tend to “play it safe”?

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

Two months ago I’d have said this is bollocks… not anymore 😅

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

@aioroslm Icardi dice que no entiende el chiste

[Martin Verzilli @mverzilli]

Apps that let users interact via AI prompts have wonderful second order effects for UX designers: even when it fails, you now have a realtime, direct stream of things users wished your app did for them!

[Mike Connor @mike_connor]

I'm quite proud of this milestone.



Private transactions are finally live on Ethereum!

- Private function inputs

- Private state

- Private contractual terms
- (you don't even need to broadcast the bytecode to execute private fns, so your agreements can stay private)

- Private execution

- Private msg_sender

- Private composability

- Private smart contracts making external calls to other private smart contracts, in a single tx, all on the user's device.

- Private logs

- Private consumption of L1->L2 messages

- Private emission of L2->L1 messages



Observers learn: someone did something; we're not sure what, but we know they followed the rules of whatever it was.



Plus, composability with public smart contracts:

- Public state, functions, smart contract code, execution, events, etc.

- Make public fn calls from private

- Emit notes & nullifiers from public



Plus, composability with L1 liquidity and state through L1<>L2 messaging.



Plus, composability with the growing ecosystem of "proofs of everything". Verify zk-proofs of whatever directly in private smart contracts, without revealing what you were verifying or even the fact that you verified a proof. 



Easy programmability, with a novel smart contract framework which:


- provides convenient abstractions to help you build quickly and safely on top of a note/nullifier-based protocol.

- has rails for simple emission and efficient discovery of private logs (encrypted notes and messages)

 - no more brute-forcing of notes

- handles db management of notes, nullifiers, logs for all smart contracts

- simple js sdk for deploying and interacting with smart contracts



Flexibility, for advanced devs:


- Custom note structs

- Custom nullification schemes (if you want)

- Custom private log emission, delivery, and processing:

- Custom secret sharing

- Custom encryption schemes

- Offchain logs, Onchain logs (via blobs)

 - Constrained or unconstrained delivery of logs (depending on your use case)

- Custom discovery and processing of logs



That's ideal for customising private token designs however you need.



Abstraction



- Account abstraction:

- No EoAs: there are only smart contracts.

 - Any contract can be the "entrypoint" to a tx (as long as it accepts msg_sender == null).

 - A dapp can be the entrypoint, if you meet its custom entrypoint criteria:

- Custom tx entrypoint criteria:

 - Traditional signatures:

 - Any signature scheme you want

 - Sign in with <whatever>

 - Passkeys

 - FaceId/TouchId

 - Password

 - Proof of zkpassport

 - Proof of membership to <something>

 - Proof of subscription to an app

- Proof of whatever you want

- A signed message from Vitalik that he likes you.

- No one will even learn what kind of custom entrypoint you used!


- Fee Abstraction:

- Pay with any token

 - Pay with NFTs, if you want

 - Dapps can pay the network fees on users' behalves:

- Subsidise certain actions and pay users' fees for better onboarding; or

- Verify a proof of subscription to your app; or

 - Verify that the user has a voucher for a free trial; or

 - Pay a fee from the user's activities within the app (e.g. extract a fee from a swap)

- Or pay directly with FeeJuice

- Pay fees privately



Works on phones and in the browser.

- That's hard to do. Lots of cryptography. Nice.



Decentralised.

- You know all the reasons why decentralisation is important.

- Decentralising an L2 is _really hard_. The block production protocol is a work of art.



Loads of innovations, behind the scenes:


- Insane client-side proving system (CHONK) for low-memory, fast proving on phones and in browsers.


- A custom zkVM (the "AVM") for efficiently proving public function execution.


- Noir: A purpose-built DSL for proving programs. Huge in its own right.


- Recursive proving of the rollup's txs into a single proof.

- Possibly my favourite fact about Aztec: You don't technically need to "deploy" a private-fn-only contract: you can just execute it and submit a proof, even if no one else in the world has ever seen the code. That's mad.


- A kzg blob-batching protocol that saves 10m gas every aztec epoch, when submitting the rollup proof to L1.


- An unhinged private kernel architecture for private function execution and composing calls between private functions that:

- Stitches-together the inputs and outputs of the circuits;

 - Enables smart contracts to only pay for merkle membership constraints that they actually need, for the number of notes that that they actually needed to read.

- Enables smart contracts to recursively call themselves if they need to nullify more notes.

- Enables a function to nullify notes that were created earlier by other functions in the same tx. It then enables that note and nullifier to be deleted to save the user $'s on DA emission.

- Safely "siloes" notes, nullifiers and logs, to prevent malicious contracts from contaminating other contracts' state or impersonating other contracts.

- Protects against Faerie Gold attacks at the protocol level.

- Enables private functions to be upgraded.

 - Enables master secret keys to be app-siloed, to prevent malicious apps from learning master secret keys (nullifier keys & viewing keys).




---

Think of a private blockchain application that you've seen. Now build it quickly on Aztec.


Think of a private blockchain application you haven't been able to build yet. Now build it quickly on Aztec.


Now compose them all together in one beautiful private ecosystem.



It's taken a while to get here.

It's still an Alpha network, so stay cautious.



We're now working on a gigantic Roadmap of enhancements. Nice.

[Aztec @aztecnetwork]

Alpha is live.

After nearly a decade, the first feature-complete privacy stack on Ethereum is here.

Developers can now build apps and contracts with ground-up customizable privacy, from execution to settlement.

https://t.co/ITasZpe0yM