# Aztec Labs Relaunches ZK Money for Private On-Chain Finance

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-09-29

## Transcript

I think the more interesting kind of privacy technologies are ones that can actually power the world's transactions and that's kind of where we sit.
Every time you pay someone on Ethereum, you're basically handing them your bank statement, your balance sheet, your history, everyone you've ever paid.
But today, one of the original privacy teams in crypto is here to change that.
ZK.Money is making its comeback.
What is this?
What does it mean?
And what do you need to know about it?
Hello and welcome to Milk Road Crypto, the show that would tell you what's in our wallet, but that's none of your business.
I'm your host, John Gillan.
Today is Monday, September 28th, and we are going to be releasing this episode on Tuesday, September 29th because of a press embargo.
But today we are joined by Joe Andrews, who is the co-founder and CEO of Aztec Labs, the company behind the Aztec Network, which is a privacy-focused Ethereum layer 2.
Privacy is one of the hottest stories in crypto right now.
Joe is one of the leading experts on all of this.
He's going to tell us what you need to know about it.
If that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
And as a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful partners at Nexo, the digital asset platform that lets you trade, earn and borrow all in one place, all in one account.
So keep an ear out for more information on them later in the episode.
But for now, welcome to Milk Road Crypto, Joe Andrews.
How are you?
Hey, thank you.
Thanks for having me on.
Super excited to be here.
I'm excited to talk to you, man.
You're doing some big things.
Joe, before we get into ZK.money.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
What is Aztec Labs?
What is the Aztec network?
And what should people know about these things?
Yeah, I think we can start maybe seven, eight years ago now.
So my journey in crypto has been a long one.
We kind of started in 2017, 2018, kind of like green-eyed and looking at this kind of new technology to disrupt kind of modern.
like on-chain kind of like what was I bring modern banking practices on chain and other things and we started looking in 2017-2018 about how we could put like corporate finance onto blockchains and we realized pretty quickly that blockchains as they stood back then were pretty useless for most real world interactions because they lack a core tenant which is privacy.
if you kind of you know transact in the real world today you just have this level of privacy that um we take for granted in in the western world um you know if i can't see your bank account when you pay me i can't see you know how much you spend on your groceries um there's just these basic principles that didn't exist um on blockchains for the last kind of 10 plus years when we were starting to think about uh putting in corporate finance uh on chain the problem kind of compounds like businesses have this to an even higher degree than kind of you know we expect like most businesses rely on some information asymmetry whether it's you know their suppliers how much they buy a product for their portfolios what they're trading like the whole kind of corporate finance industry is relies on information asymmetry and usually you you get get that for a middleman and For this to kind of work on a public blockchain, something had to change.
And so when we started trying to put these corporate finance tools on Ethereum, we kept running into the same problem of it's all public.
This is not going to work.
And so Zach, my co-founder at the time, started trying to solve that problem.
And the technology behind privacy on Ethereum and public blockchains in general has...
expanded a lot in the last decade.
Like eight, nine years ago, you could barely encrypt a number and put it on chain.
And what Aztec is, is the culmination of eight plus years of research, mostly by Zach who...
is kind of the co-founder of Aztec as well into zero knowledge proofs that enable you to now not just encrypt numbers but encrypt entire programs and so we've been building this kind of technology suite which culminated in the launch of a fully decentralized layer 2 on Ethereum late last year and the network kind of went live in alpha form earlier this year and that is the Aztec network it's a layer 2 that allows you to deploy private applications on top of public ethereum so you can have private state public state you can encrypt things kind of all of the things we wanted kind of seven eight years ago and now and are possible um and you can start to onboard kind of real world finance uh onto these public rails and that's the aztec network so as it labs which is um the company i run in the core developer of that technology um for the last kind of eight plus years.
The network is actually kind of launched and stewarded by a Swiss foundation.
But the company now has taken on a new life, which is building things on top of the network to show what's possible.
Like we've spent all this time bringing the network into existence.
And now it's here.
We want to start showing people, hey, you know, we don't have to do things on pure public blockchains anymore.
There's a much better way.
And that's why Astor Labs is.
Just want to pause for a quick second to remind you all that the crypto bull market is back.
I have been deploying capital into altcoins that I think are going to do very well this bull market.
Some of them are already up over 2x from where I entered.
So if you want to see what's in my portfolio, what's on my watch list, and have access to me in Discord to ask questions 24 hours a day, join Milkroad Pro now.
The link is in the description.
It's just a dollar.
I'll see you there.
Joe, thank you so much for some of that context and history around the company and on privacy.
Could we just like back up a little bit when you pay someone in cash like that is not like a public record being created, but that is sort of the default in crypto.
Why did we get to the place where that is the default?
And what are some of the security problems this poses or just, you know, drawbacks to that being the default that you're trying to solve with the asset network?
Yeah, this is a great question, actually.
So it kind of you have to.
look a little bit into how blockchains work to understand, I guess, why everything is public and why kind of cash is not the default.
My favorite kind of analogy here is if you think about what a blockchain is, it's basically a group of nodes that are all trying to come to an agreement on a ledger, like who has what balance.
And if we do an example here where, you know, if I've got $100 and I want to send $10 to you, in order for the 10 different nodes, let's say they just are 10 friends and we want to agree, did Joe actually pay John $10?
Well, there needs to be a public request.
So in order for everyone to kind of like see what's happened, you can imagine kind of they have to visibly view my wallet, which has $100 in it.
They have to see me take out $10 and then they have to give it to, they have to see me give it to you.
And if 10 people kind of, in a blockchain case, 51 out of 100 people say yes, they saw that, then the transaction is recorded on the ledger.
And so the fact that you need consensus and you need independent parties who could be anywhere in the world to validate your transaction on a blockchain, that's why this default public status exists and you can't just have a transaction between.
two parties that's private.
So it's kind of baked into most blockchains that they have to be public in order for nodes to agree on what happened.
So it's fairly fundamental.
And, you know, you may kind of then follow up and say, well, how does how does that work?
And how do these kind of privacy preserving technologies work?
And the answer is this technology called zero knowledge proofs.
And instead of us, you know, doing a basic transaction, you know, 100 minus 10 is 90, the actual computation is a much more expressive mathematical proof.
And you can still broadcast that proof publicly and all the nodes can check it, but you don't reveal any information about what actually happened.
And so that technology is zero knowledge proofs and Aztec is built around that to enable nodes to check arbitrary statements without revealing the context of those statements.
My favorite analogy is a bit like HTTPS on the internet.
Before HTTPS, the little green padlock in the corner of your browser, you couldn't have card payments because your information was sent in plain text across the internet.
It's a bit of a similar analogy here where after HTTPS, or in this case, zero-knowledge proofs, you can now start to send encrypted information on blockchains or on the internet, which enables a lot more functionality.
A lot of work had to go into unlocking that, but it's this premise of consensus that means that things have to be deep or public in blockchains.
Okay, well, let's talk about this because zero knowledge or ZK technology has been something that people talked about for a long time.
You guys have launched a product built on this called ZK.money, which you're just launching today.
So this is the big news that's coming out.
But explain to us a little bit about what ZK.money is, what someone can do with it, and sort of like how this product instantiates some of these privacy features that you've been trying to bring to market.
Yeah, so ZK.money is a payments product out the gate.
So it enables you to kind of pay.
anyone on Ethereum, kind of a human friendly tag.
So instead of paying some random hexadecimal string, if you had the tag at John, I can just pay you a bit like a Venmo style experience and it's fully non custodial and it's fully private.
So the initial features.
payments and also conditional payments to payment links.
And we'll be kind of expanding the features over the coming weeks with savings, swaps, transfers in the real world and card payments and those things.
So you can kind of think of it a bit like a private neobank, but built on public blockchain rails.
And most other people who are doing this, obviously they're just using public rails, so they don't get the privacy part.
So that's the big differentiator.
Okay, so talk to me about what the product allows people to do.
The place to start with is just with payments, but are there things you think you could evolve this for in the future?
And where do you kind of see this going as ZK.money starts to be adopted?
Yeah, I think the first part that's just worth flagging is, you know...
Blockchains have come on a long way in terms of usability and UX.
But if you still connect to Ethereum, for the most part, you're probably still connecting via Metamask or Rabi or one of these wallets.
And a lot of these usability features are not actually used.
So out of the gate, we wanted to build a kind of UX for basic payments that...
like normies and Web2 people could enjoy.
So there's no seed phrases on ZK Money.
You don't have to pay gas once you're in the app and everything just kind of works like you'd expect if you're using kind of a Venmo style product.
So we spend a lot of time trying to optimize the user experience so that you can just touch with your finger or with Face ID and a payment will kind of leave your wallet and be sent privately to its destination and you don't need to kind of worry about.
remembering hexadecimal addresses.
You just have tags and contacts like you'd expect in the Web2 world.
So that's kind of out the gate where we spent a lot of initial time.
Once we've built that foundation, we're planning on expanding to support savings vaults, swaps to different assets, and things that you'd expect to be able to use that money in the real world.
It's great being able to pay your friends privately in crypto, but if you want to be able to use this as a...
kind of replacement for a custodial account, you need to also be able to pay people in the real world.
So adding kind of bank transfers and cards, those sorts of things are kind of on the roadmap for later in the year.
This is all a retail product.
There's an equivalent set of features we can talk about with institutions as well, which I think will be exciting.
But we're starting with retail because it's an easier kind of market to go after and iterate and test for now.
Okay, so the idea is new banking services with retail for now, and there's more there.
I want to ask a little bit about the history.
This is not the first time you guys have launched ZK.money.
You had, I think, around 75,000 wallets and $100 million in volume the last time you did this, but that was shut down, I believe, in 2023.
Why the relaunch now?
And talk to me about the lessons learned from that.
Just give me some of the history on this.
Yeah, it's a great question.
We had a previous version of this product on a much earlier version of Aztec.
That version was more centralized and it was very limited on what you could do.
You could think about it as the difference between maybe a Zcash and an Ethereum.
So the original ZK money, all you could do was payments.
If we wanted to...
add new functionality, we'd actually have to upgrade the network and change the underlying core primitive of a transaction to add things like swaps or other things to the system.
We realized two things when we were running that product.
One, that the ability to kind of iterate it and add features was way too difficult because it required people to be a low-level cryptographer.
and understand the intricacies of writing through knowledge proofs.
Our team could do it, but it was very error prone and not something that you could do easily as a normal developer.
And secondly, we needed to decentralize this if we were going to scale it to a lot more users.
So we ended up shutting down that version of the product to focus on building the fully decentralized version of Aztec.
And that gave us two things.
One, The network now just runs on its own.
There's about four and a half, 5,000 nodes all around the world that are just running the Aztec network.
So we don't have to do that anymore.
We can focus on building products.
And two, the network itself is programmable and has a programming language called NOAA, which means that anyone can write programs on the network that add features.
So instead of just having payments be the only type of transaction, you want to build a new...
complex type of transaction that's a swap plus lending plus all sorts of things.
I've got lots of things we can talk about in a minute about the types of transactions I'm excited about.
You can just write a program and not deploy it to the network, you're good to go.
And so it's kind of the difference between like having it running on a single payment rail like a Zcash and a more programmable network like Ethereum.
But that's why we kind of ended up going away for two, three years building.
building this version of Aztec.
And now it's back to kind of take advantage of all of those features, which is super exciting.
I love that story and that trajectory and the progress you've made there.
I know there's just many, many years of work that went into getting to this point.
So congratulations on that.
You mentioned Zcash.
I would love for you to just differentiate for me the functionality and how Aztec Network works, what you can do with it versus Zcash.
Because Zcash's big pitch is like...
private money and being able to transact privately.
Obviously, there's a lot more to Aztec network than just that.
But talk to me a little bit about that and what people should know about the differences between these.
I think the best analogy is kind of the Ethereum to Bitcoin kind of analogy.
So I think Zcash is two things.
It's an asset and it's a way to send that asset privately.
And so you can...
You can get utility in both ways.
One from just holding the asset because you think it's a store of value or you think it's a asset you want to hold and invest in.
And then you can also get utility out of it by sending it to someone else privately.
But your transaction is in Zcash, which means that, you know, it's maybe not that useful if you're a business that accepts dollars or you need to do euros or pounds or other kind of assets.
And so Ethereum is kind of, you know, the programmable version of a blockchain.
In this model, it's not like Bitcoin where there's one asset, Bitcoin and Zcash, Ethereum and Aztec is kind of the analogy I'm trying to draw here.
Aztec is kind of this general purpose layer, a bit like Ethereum, but we have privacy built into it.
So when you deploy an application on Aztec, you can have extra features that are privacy.
enabling privacy in an application.
The main difference would be Zcash is kind of a blockchain that has one program and one asset.
Aztec is a network that enables you to deploy any number of programs in any number of assets and have them all be encrypted if you want to.
So ZK Money in this example is effectively one set of programs we've deployed to Aztec that supports.
Any number of assets at launch will support DAI, USDT, USDC, and Ethereum as some assets.
But as we expand the feature set, we can have other tokens coming in, we can have RWAs, we can have yield bearing assets.
All sorts of things can go in the system because it's a programmable layer, unlike Zcash, which is one asset.
One analogy, and I'd like to hear, you know, you may disagree with this, but one analogy I've heard is like, it's kind of like a fixed blade versus a Swiss army knife.
There's just like a lot more applications and things you can do, even though they were both knives.
But yeah, there's a lot.
And I think that the Bitcoin to Ethereum, Zcash to Aztec network, that analogy is helpful there.
I think we'll get deeper into this Zcash question at some point.
But I do want to come back to Ethereum because I think it's an interesting question of why you decided to build Asic Network on Ethereum as a privacy layer two, as opposed to just spinning out your own layer one.
Because like you said, you've got several thousand validators around the globe.
You could have just done your own layer one.
Why build this on Ethereum?
And what was the decision making process on that?
Yeah, we've been back and forth on this question a lot over the years.
And it comes down to two things.
One is, you know, Ethereum is kind of like a record of global consensus.
What happened is the strongest kind of you can really get for a programmable blockchain.
And so if you want the assets that you're transacting to be, you know, have the kind of consensus and the backing of Ethereum behind them, whenever a transaction says confirmed, you must be on Ethereum.
And if you want to compete with that, you know, you have to kind of get enough.
activity on your network just in staking and enough value in the kind of the staking set such that you can kind of compete with Ethereum's consensus capital is like a word that people use for it.
And so I think recreating that from scratch is a very difficult thing to do.
Obviously, lots of people like to do that and be an L1 because it's a very big prize if you can achieve it.
But in practice, there's a massive network effect behind Ethereum and it's quite hard to upset that.
And given we were already doing something very, very difficult with bringing programmable privacy to blockchain, doing that and trying to kind of attract more capital than Ethereum is, you know, you're having to solve two very, very hard problems.
So that's the first kind of just practical answer.
I think the more kind of like philosophical answer is that you also need to look at economic activity.
I sometimes get berated for saying this, but privacy is actually, pretty useless unless there's economic activity, right?
It's like the famous analogy of if a tree falls in a forest, does anyone care if you can't see it?
If you're on a blockchain where there's just one person, one node, and you're the only user, does it matter that it's public or private?
And the answer is probably it doesn't matter.
Privacy is not really the reason that you're there.
you care about privacy when there's a lot of economic activity and your experience either as a business or as a user is made worse by a lack of privacy.
So it's kind of privacy enables products rather than privacy is the product is the way I think about it and because Ethereum has the most economic activity it makes the most sense to build a privacy layer on top of Ethereum because we're the closest we can be to that.
economic activity.
It means it's very easy to bring that economic activity into Aztec and back to Ethereum.
So if we want to do a swap, we can actually just swap with Uniswap and we can get a bit of privacy doing that.
If we want to have like a savings vault, we can kind of connect to Aave or Morpho and connect to all of the activity that's already happening and add bits of privacy to that.
So it's a lot easier to kind of do that if you're...
really connected to Ethereum as an L2 versus having to kind of bridge in and bridge out as an alternative L1.
Gotcha.
Okay, that's really helpful context on there.
I want to get your thoughts on this as well.
Ethereum's own teams are working on developing privacy solutions as well.
The Ethereum Foundation has a project called, I may mispronounce this, so forgive me, but I think it's Kohaku.
Kohaku, which is trying to deliver privacy directly on the L1 for Ethereum wallets.
Can you talk to me about how you think about this?
Is this a competitor?
Is this a partner to the Aztec network?
Or just like, how do you see other privacy solutions in the Ethereum ecosystem relative to what you're building?
Yeah, I think the more people focusing on privacy, in my view, the better.
I think if...
If there are kind of initiatives to just do basic private payments, you can think of them as competitive with ZK Money.
I think we would have a far better UX and kind of just user flows today.
I'm also though very bullish on the Ethereum privacy roadmap because we've had to build a lot of things into Aztec that if they were built into Ethereum would make Aztec.
much more performant and easier to use.
So I think there's a lot of kind of synergies between the two roadmaps and as Ethereum scales and as these features, we can take advantage of them both at the Aztec level and also in the applications we build on top of Aztec.
I think ultimately whether they're competitive long term is kind of is going to be judged by whether Ethereum stays credibly neutral.
You know, they at the moment, usually just build things into the protocol that make applications easier.
And Kohaku is, you know, it's spin out from the EF, it's not actually built into Ethereum.
And so, yeah, whether they stay kind of in that kind of methodology or not, is kind of time will tell.
But they haven't enshrined Uniswap into the protocol and it's like the most successful swap.
So to me, it would feel a step too far for them to kind of enshrine.
full private transactions into the protocol.
And usually they will pump that to the application layer.
And yeah, the application layer, I think we will win hands down.
So I'm not too worried there.
Also, the last part I'd say is that privacy is also, there's a network effect around it.
So the more you can have different privacy apps on Ethereum, you have privacy sets associated with them.
And so, you know, if there was a thousand users in one privacy and privacy set and 10,000 in another, If those can be connected together, then you kind of your users can share a much larger privacy set.
So net net, I think the more people are focusing on privacy on Ethereum, the better the ultimate privacy will be for end users, which is just a positive thing for everyone.
You know, one of the weird things about crypto is that the longer you're in it, the more accounts you seem to end up with.
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I think you will too.
Tell them Milk Road sent you.
Okay, this is making me more and more bullish the longer I keep talking to you.
I want to talk a little bit more about some of these functionality, not just the differences between Aztec and Zcash, but like the functionality set for different users, right?
Like there's different use cases for privacy for...
Privacy, privacy, whichever side of the pond you're on when you're pronouncing it.
But it's different for retail, for businesses, for institutions, individuals.
Talk to me a little bit about how you see that.
And then, you know, AI agents could come into this conversation too.
Just talk to me a little bit about some of the differences in terms of the user groups and how you're trying to think about servicing them with the products you're building.
Yes, it's a great question.
And I think, I mean, the rise of AI is actually a great place to start.
I think we see kind of like every day, like, you know, there's a data breach somewhere and someone's KYC information is leaked on the internet.
And the, you know, AI is kind of, I would say, largely responsible for at least the increase in data breaches.
Like it's much easier to kind of adversarial people to try and hack data.
And the thing that's quite scary is, you know, in an AI age, when you have agents transacting for you on chain, and you have more data breaches, you're creating a lot more public fingerprints of who you are on chain and your personal data is leaked a lot more frequently.
And so these two things combined together mean it's very, very easy to figure out that I'm Joe, this is my Ethereum address, and this is how much money I have.
And wrench attacks and these sorts of things that we see in Europe and in France and other areas where people are held ransom because they have crypto or they're kidnapped because they have crypto just become more and more prevalent.
And the things that we care about building are things that protect against that.
So in order to protect against that, you have to do two things.
One, make transactions private, but you also have to, inside the transaction, still have conditional logic.
You can't just have basic payments.
You may want to do something like, I can send you a payment, but you can only claim it if you have a passport that has your name on it.
So in that world, you know...
You may get compliance benefits.
You also get extra security from it.
And there's lots of things you can do in this way where you can attach logic into a payment because you have privacy.
One example we have in ZK Money of this feature is being able to pay someone to their email address.
So if I have your email address, I can send a payment link to you.
I can put it in an email and you can only claim it if you prove you have ownership of that email.
And so it...
these features enable you to build better user experiences, but you can only do it because you have a form of privacy.
The flip side, and maybe a good way to just visualize this, is if you bind a payment to a passport or an email, you would never put that on Ethereum because you'd be like, wait, I'm putting my passport information on a public blockchain, or I'm putting my email address on a public blockchain, but you can now do these sorts of things.
And so I know it's a little bit meta, but those are the sorts of features that...
we're trying to kind of build and we feel like they can really help you know these products actually enter our daily lives that's on the kind of like who I am and trans like who I am when I'm transacting side there's basic more basic things around kind of you know swaps savings just being able to transact in the assets that you want that you may want to do privately but these kind of programmable private payments are the ones that I think I'm more excited by because they're things that they weren't possible before without privacy Gotcha.
Okay, so there's a lot there.
I want to talk about the institutional angle on this.
Institutions for a long time have said they can't come on chain because having all of their positions be public is like a security risk and a lot of other… problems for them.
Do you think that now after years of working on this, you've finally gotten to a place where, you know, that you now have solutions that are able to, you know, meet the needs of those institutions, bring that capital on chain?
Or are there still things that you think are on the roadmap that need to get shipped before that really starts to happen in size?
I think we have the basic building blocks where anything an institution kind of needs to go on chain can now be built.
that's still not the same as an institution actually coming on chain.
I think a few things are probably still missing.
One is sufficient compliance and regulatory clarity around how these technologies kind of work.
We're getting there.
It's, you know, it's changing every day in the US at the moment.
But, you know, that is a big part of this.
And so I think we have the ability to bring a lot of institutions on chain, but without that kind of like...
rubber stamp of this is the right way to do things.
It is a lot harder.
I think we're starting to see very positive things out of the last week of Hester Pierce's SEC reign where she's at least tried to lay the foundation for a lot of pro-blockchain, even pro-privacy angles.
The most exciting one is around KYC for us and her recently coming out and saying that KYC is basically...
a wave, it's like a giant honeypup that shouldn't exist anymore and there's better ways to do it with zero knowledge proofs.
We actually have a separate product called ZK Passport that does exactly this, which we will combine with ZK Money to enable these flows.
So I think we're definitely getting there, but the last piece is still regulatory clarity.
I think what you can now do on a public blockchain is definitely sufficient to...
bring an institutional chain.
They just need the last little push.
ZK Passport is another product that Aztec Network has launched.
And I don't want to dive too deep into this right now because, you know, but there's something that our audience should take away from this is go learn more about Aztec Network and what they're offering and how they're solving these things with zero technology or zero knowledge technology.
Because just like you said, Hester Pierce is talking about this.
There are better ways to do this now.
And learning about that is important.
I want to talk about something with the last few minutes we have here, the financial side of this.
Zcash has gone from, I think it was around like $4,450 or so in June.
Now it's over $1,500.
It's one of the biggest pumps in the market that we've seen this year.
Something like a $25, $26 billion market cap now in this privacy token.
Do you think that the market is going to continue to reward projects that have...
privacy solutions here and just what do you make of this sudden move of capital into Zcash after so long of it just like languishing sideways?
Like what's your read of this whole situation here?
They've done the market very, very well.
I think that a few things.
One, as I said earlier, like Zcash is two things.
It's a privacy technology, but it's also an asset.
And so the reason that I think you can correlate the two so strongly in Zcash is that by holding Zcash, you have some privacy benefit of your net worth.
So for kind of people who were historically holding Bitcoin, you know, and they would lose some privacy doing that potentially, there's a kind of like a clear pitch from like one store of value to more private store of value.
It's like, do you want gold on your bed or do you want gold under your bed?
As an analogy.
So I think that there's definitely a thesis there that makes sense to me.
I don't know if the current levels of hype around it justify given that it is purely just a store of value and it's kind of speculative in that nature.
I think the more interesting privacy technologies are ones that can actually power the world's transactions and that's kind of where we sit and they obviously operate on a different economic model which is transaction fees and adoption of the technology globally.
It's a different thesis, right?
One requires lots of people to hold Zcash and the price will go up.
The other requires lots of world-changing applications to be built on crypto rails that need privacy.
And then transactions drive the economic model of these networks like Aztec.
And so they both require users to believe in one privacy, but in a different way, if that makes sense.
And so I think The timing of Zcash has been great with AI and being able to show the difference between public Bitcoin and a more private Zcash.
I don't know if it's going to be able to sustain another 5-6x or whatever it's gone in the last three months.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I was reliably told that it was going to infinity overnight.
So yeah, that's not financial advice and a joke.
So just to be clear, in case anybody takes that literally.
Joe, I do want to talk about the Aztec token here.
And just situate for me where the token sits in all of this, in these products that you're building, in the networks that you're building, how it captures value.
Talk to me a little bit about the token, why you have one, and how you see it fitting into this ecosystem you're building.
Yes, it's a great question.
You know, Aztec is a fully decentralized network and the token powers that.
So it's what enables, you know, stakers from around the world to stake.
They stake in the token and it creates kind of economic penalties if they misbehave and it gives them rewards when they do their job correctly.
And so the primary reason for Aztec having a token is to fulfill decentralization and have this incredibly neutral layer that people can build applications on.
And privacy has not always had the best view with regulators.
It's a double-edged sword of how people view it.
We've seen this throughout time with technology.
When we had the email encryption wars, we had SSL being banned in the US.
We've had various forms of technology, even with the current tomato cash cases where privacy and blockchains is a double-edged sword.
We had to launch Aztec decentralized to make sure that it wasn't controlled and owned by anyone because someone owning all the data of the blockchain is a very bad outcome.
So the reason that the token exists is to facilitate that decentralization and make sure that there's economic incentives to actually keep the network decentralized.
What it means day to day is under the hood transactions on Aztec.
are paid.
The fees are paid in the Aztec token.
A small amount is burned in every transaction and fees go to the sequencers or provers who actually make sure the blocks are produced and sent up to Ethereum.
You don't see that in an app like ZK Money because we've got full fee abstraction.
So under the hood, fees are being paid, but you'll just see DAI in your account or dollars in your account and you'll never see any of this.
But that's just a because we have a very programmable network that we've managed to abstract, you know, past kind of C phrases.
We don't, we have past cases of C phrases.
We don't have gas.
It just kind of works under the hood, but it is there in every transaction.
You could go to a...
block explorer, you wouldn't be able to see what the contents of that transaction was, but you would be able to see a small amount of asset tokens being sent or burnt under the hood in that transaction.
So yeah, that's the purpose of the token on the network side and people use it for that purpose.
Gotcha.
And as there's more adoption of the Aztec network, more transactions, more volume, more burning, makes sense.
I want to ask a final question here.
We talked a little bit about the strategy for institutions, for enterprises and businesses, and for individuals.
Do you have a differentiated strategy for AI agents and getting them to adopt the products that you're building?
And what does that look like right now?
And what have those conversations been like?
Yeah, so they are early, but we've been starting to explore a few things with CK Money.
The best way to think about it is you probably wouldn't give Claude or your favorite agent full access to a bank account today because it could run wild, right?
It could do these things.
And if you give it a private key, you should basically assume that all funds on that private key are lost.
With programmable private transactions, you can do two things.
You can constrain...
what's possible for an agent to do.
So a good example is like this idea we have for institutions and invoices.
You can have some sort of local client-side technology that scans your inbox and you could have an agent create invoice proofs.
Every time you get an invoice coming in, you could kind of have an agent look for your inbox and decide to make a payment.
If you just gave an agent carte blanche access to your bank account to do that, it'd be very likely at some point that the agent could do something wrong, pay the wrong person.
It's possible with a technology like Aztec and CK Money to make sure that a payment can only exist if it follows a cryptographic set of rules.
And one example of that is every email in your inbox is signed by a sender and recipient.
And so you can prove that under the hood in the email protocol, there's a email that came in from stripe.com and inside that email there's a pdf and inside the pdf there's an iban and there's a bank bank account and a thousand dollars and a date and so you can prove all of this in a zero knowledge proof and effectively have a type of programmable payment on zk money or aztec that says you know this payment can only be created if an email came in from one of my approved email kind of invoice partners, there is a PDF in the email that has a valid bank account that I've paid before and all of these kind of conditions can be proved and that really constrains what an agent can do such that you don't have to trust the agent anymore.
If Claude goes rogue or one of these kind of agents starts hallucinating, they actually can't do that much damage if you constrain the payment.
correctly.
So this is one area we're looking at because it would mean that like internally we would feel comfortable setting kind of an agent loose on our kind of invoices because we could just we could constrain what it could do.
So that's one example that we're exploring.
I think the other kind of more obvious one is just you know as you start to get agents to do payroll or in the more kind of like consumer landscape, buy your groceries and do these things.
You just don't want that information to be linked back to you again.
So it's basic private payments again.
So it's all around either constraining what an agent can do or making sure that the information that's leaked and associated with you.
is kind of not there.
And so both are very valuable.
Joe Andrews, co-founder and CEO of Aztec Labs.
Thank you so much for being on Milkard Crypto.
I learned a lot from this conversation.
I've been very fascinated by watching this technology develop and by watching you guys building what you've been doing for so many years.
So thank you so much for being here and sharing all this alpha with our community and our audience.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Yeah, you can follow Aztec Labs on X or my X handle is in the description below.
And if you want to check out ZK Money, you can check it out tomorrow or today at launch.zk.money and you'll be able to kind of, you know...
Claim your tag, a bit like Venmo if you're in the US, and just start paying your friends privately with lots more features to come later in the year.
So stay tuned.
We will definitely stay tuned.
And yes, this is coming out on Tuesday, so ZK Money will be live by the time this episode is out.
So definitely go check it out.
Claim your tag.
Joe Andrews, thank you so much for being here.
I hope we can catch up again soon.
Awesome.
Yeah, it's been a pleasure.
And thanks for the time and the great questions.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
I know I did.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of Milk Road Crypto.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
Everything you hear on Milk Road is for informational purposes only.
These are our personal opinions, not financial advice.
And we may own some of the investments we talk about.
Always do your own research and make the decisions that are right for you.
See you next time.