Aztec Network has officially launched its Ignition Chain, a privacy-focused Layer 2 built on Ethereum, a major step toward decentralized, privacy-preserving infrastructure. The Wednesday launch came after the start of the AZTEC token sale last week. In their words, the Ignition Chain is the “world’s first fully decentralized L2 on Ethereum”, thus it enables developers to build applications with end-to-end confidentiality by employing zero-knowledge proof technology.
The Ignition Chain rollout on the Ethereum mainnet was accomplished when the validator queue reached 500, thus triggering block production and decentralizing the consensus layer, activating the Aztec Network. This followed the public testnet that went live in May and demonstrated programmable privacy capabilities.
Aztec team talked about the Ignition Chain as the core of their “private world computer” that was supposed to be the first to introduce privacy to DeFi applications without giving up the verifiability on Ethereum. The network is targeting the openness issues of current blockchains by combining distributed settlement with privacy-preserving computation.
In addition to the mainnet launch, Aztec has been holding a token sale for AZTEC, the native asset of Ignition Chain. The token is the one that will be used for staking, governance, and validator participation, with 200,000 staked tokens as a requirement for a validator to become active. The sale registration opened last week and has already attracted around $2.5 million, with 2,088 bids from 1,925 unique bidders.
A public auction will start on Dec. 2; thus, the next phase of Aztec’s decentralization roadmap will be unveiled. In 2022, the Aztec team, through its Series B round led by a16z, raised $100 million, which was a great support for the long-term development of privacy-focused blockchain infrastructure. Co-founder Zac Williamson predicted that the coming ten years will be a major turning point when privacy technologies in blockchain will become dominant. He argued that the data, which is now tightly held within centralized Web2 platforms, will be the one that will go to user-controlled systems powered by distributed ledgers.
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