Crypto privacy project Aztec has released its v5 upgrade in alpha, taking a step toward making fully private transactions "the default" in the Ethereum ecosystem, Aztec co-founder Zac Williamson told The Block in an interview.
The update, passed by token-holder governance and executed onchain on Tuesday, enables users to generate end-to-end private transactions directly on their own devices, like their phones and consumer laptops, while retaining the censorship resistance and decentralization of crypto.
This "client-side proving" process differs from the approach used by most other ZK projects, where zero-knowledge proofs are generated in centralized data centers, Williamson said.
"We've been ruthlessly saying we need to prove things on phones, on consumer laptops, on some random $500 Lenovo piece of junk, if this technology is going to actually have an impact," Aztec co-founder Zac Williamson told The Block in an interview.
According to a press release on Tuesday, the upgrade reduces private transaction proving times by more than 2x, cuts the average cost of a fully private transaction by roughly 50%, and shortens average block production time from 14 seconds to six seconds.
