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Welcome to Wonderland's Aztec Handbook ✨

Why Privacy Matters​

Think about it: would you be comfortable if everyone could see your bank account balance, salary, rent payments, and every purchase you make? Of course not. Yet that's exactly what happens on most blockchains today.

If we dream of a world where DeFi becomes mainstream, where your grandmother uses crypto to pay for groceries and your local coffee shop accepts digital payments, we need privacy. Real privacy. The kind that lets you choose what stays between you and the people you're transacting with.

This isn't about hiding illegal activity. It's about basic human dignity and the right to financial privacy that we take for granted in the traditional world.

But wait... what is Aztec anyway?​

Aztec is building something different: a privacy-first L2 on Ethereum where you get to decide what stays private and what becomes public.

When you write a smart contract on Aztec, you can make some functions private (they run on your device and generate a cryptographic proof) and others public (they run transparently like regular Ethereum contracts). The network verifies that everything happened correctly without ever seeing your private data.

It's like having a bank account where you can choose, transaction by transaction, whether to show your balance to the world or keep it between you and the person you're paying. Unlike other "privacy" solutions that bolt privacy on as an afterthought, Aztec built it from the ground up.

The magic happens through a concept known as zero-knowledge proofs. Your device proves "yes, I did execute this transaction correctly, and I do have the money to spend" without revealing how much you have or where it came from. The network validates the proof and updates the state accordingly.

What You'll Learn in This Handbook​

Whether you're here to build the next generation of private applications, understand the cryptography that makes it possible, or figure out how all these pieces fit together, this guide will take you there.

You'll explore:

  • Background: The core ideas that power Aztec: an introduction to UTXOs, nullifiers, and zero-knowledge proofs, explained in plain language (or at least we tried to)
  • Stack (WIP): How all the pieces fit together, from the virtual machine that runs your code to the prover that generates proofs
  • Transactions & Messaging (WIP): How private and public executions work, how they talk to each other, and how the whole system communicates with Ethereum
  • Consensus (WIP): How the network agrees on what happened without seeing what happened

There are more sections coming soon, from standards to the governance system. Aztec is in the early stages, so this handbook will evolve with the network and with every developer who joins the mission. Feel free to contribute! We're building the infrastructure for a world where privacy is the default, not the exception.

Ready to help build it? Let's go 🛠️