Representatives from each team gathered in New York City during the week of TQuorum to run AZTEC’s MPC software in preparation to be the second in a 200-participant global relay which starts later this week. TQ Tezos, Nomadic Labs and Cryptium Labs have joined Vitalik Buterin as early participants in the relay.

The AZTEC protocol

The AZTEC Protocol is a private transaction network designed for institutional-grade financial privacy to mint, redeem, send and swap assets through the AZTEC Cryptography Engine, by which the network verifies the integrity of a zero-knowledge transaction.

As described in this blog post, the AZTEC ceremony is based on a Codex of points signed via Boneh-Boyen signatures (a specific type of mathematical relationship). In order for a transaction to be accepted by the ACE, the user must prove the transaction was generated using the Codex.

The Codex is created in two stages:

1. During the Relay stage, participants hand off a transcript of points with mathematical relationships to one another. Each participant adds their own random number to the transcript, and then must destroy the number, before handing it off. Once all participants have completed, the Final Transcript is ready.

2. Post Processing is then used by AZTEC Protocol to build the final Codex, constructed from the points created during the Relay phase.

The Relay phase is essential to the integrity of the protocol. During this phase, participants build a large number of points with mathematical relationships to one another (called monomial points), by passing around a transcript. Each participant needs to roll their own random number into the transcript (which cannot then be extracted from the new transcript). They must then destroy that number.

As long as just one of the 200 participants follows the rules of the ceremony, the setup is secure.

The Final Transcript will be an important community asset, and will be used to secure many future cryptosystems beyond AZTEC 1.0 — one such example is PLONK, the efficient universal SNARK built by AZTEC Protocol and Protocol Labs, which enables fully private smart contracts on public networks.

For a basic, accessible explanation of the ceremony, follow this link. For a more detailed technical explanation, including its mathematical basis, follow this link.

Running the Ignition software

TQ Tezos, Nomadic Labs, and Cryptium Labs prepared to participate in the Relay stage of Ignition, contributing a random number to the transcript.