The TL;DR: 

The $AZTEC token sale was conducted entirely onchain to maximize transparency and fair distribution. Next steps for holders are as follows:

1. Step 1: Create your Token Vault on the sale website. Your Token Vault will keep your tokens secure on Ethereum, keep them non-transferable until TGE, allow you to stake/delegate/participate in governance, and then withdraw them to your wallet after TGE.

1. Step 2: Staking and Earning Block Rewards. If you have more than 200,000 tokens, you can start staking today on the staking dashboard. 

1. Step 3: Token sale participants can vote for TGE as early as February 11th, 2026, at which 100% of tokens from the sale become transferable, and a Uniswap V4 pool goes live. 

The $AZTEC token sale has come to a close– the sale was conducted entirely onchain, and the power is now in your hands. Over 16.7k people participated, with 19,476 ETH raised. A huge thank you to our community and everyone who participated– you all really showed up for privacy. 50% of the capital committed has come from the community of users, testnet operators and creators!

Now that you have your tokens, what’s next? This guide walks you through the next steps leading up to TGE, showing you how to withdraw, stake, and vote with your tokens.

Step 1: Creating a Token Vault 

The $AZTEC sale was conducted onchain to ensure that you have control over your own tokens from day 1 (even before tokens become transferable at TGE). 

The team has no control over your tokens. You will be self-custodying them in a smart contract known as the Token Vault on the Ethereum mainnet ahead of TGE. 

Your Token Vault contract will: 

• Keep your tokens secure on the Ethereum mainnet.
• Ensure tokens remain non-transferable until TGE.
• Allows you to stake, delegate, and take part in governance.
• After TGE, you can withdraw your tokens to your wallet.

To create and withdraw your tokens to your Token Vault, simply go to the sale website and click on ‘Create Token Vault.’ Any unused ETH from your bids will be returned to your wallet in the process of creating your Token Vault. 

Step 2: Staking and Earning Block Rewards 

If you have 200,000+ tokens, you are eligible to start staking and earning block rewards today. 

You can stake by connecting your Token Vault to the staking dashboard, just select a provider to delegate your stake. Alternatively, you can run your own sequencer node.

If your Token Vault holds 200,000+ tokens, you must stake in order to withdraw your tokens after TGE. If your Token Vault holds less than 200,000 tokens, you can withdraw without any additional steps at TGE

Fractional staking for anyone with less than 200,000 tokens is not currently supported, but multiple external projects are already working to offer this in the future. 

Step 3: TGE 

TGE is triggered by an onchain governance vote, which can happen as early as February 11th, 2026. 

At TGE, 100% of tokens from the token sale will be transferable. Only token sale participants and genesis sequencers can participate in the TGE vote, and only tokens purchased in the sale will become transferrable. 

How does the voting process work? 

Community members discuss potential votes on the governance forum. If the community agrees, sequencers signal to start a vote with their block proposals. Once enough sequencers agree, the vote goes onchain for eligible token holders. 

Voting lasts 7 days, requires participation of at least 100,000,000 $AZTEC tokens, and passes if 2/3 vote yes.

What happens when the vote passes? 

Following a successful yes vote, anyone can execute the proposal after a 7-day execution delay, triggering TGE. 

At TGE, the following tokens will be 100% unlocked and available for trading: 

• All tokens in Token Vaults that belong to token sale participants.
• Accumulated block rewards for anyone staking.
• Uniswap V4 pool. This pool will have 273,000,000 $AZTEC tokens and a matching ETH amount at the final clearing price. 

Join us Thursday, December 11th at 3 pm UTC for the next Discord Town Hall–AMA style on next steps for token holders. Follow Aztec on X to stay up to date on the latest developments.

Every time you swap tokens on Uniswap, deposit into a yield vault, or vote in a DAO, you're broadcasting your moves to the world. Anyone can see what you own, where you trade, how much you invest, and when you move your money.

Tracking and analysis tools like Chainalysis and TRM are already extremely advanced, and will only grow stronger with advances in AI in the coming years. The implications of this are that the ‘pseudo-anonymous’ wallets on Ethereum are quickly becoming linked to real-world identities. This is concerning for protecting your personal privacy, but it’s also a major blocker in bringing institutions on-chain with full compliance for their users. 

Until now, your only option was to abandon your favorite apps and move to specialized privacy-focused apps or chains with varying degrees of privacy. You'd lose access to the DeFi ecosystem as you know it now, the liquidity you depend on, and the community you're part of. 

What if you could keep using Uniswap, Aave, Yearn, and every other app you love, but with your identity staying private? No switching chains. Just an incognito mode for your existing on-chain life? 

If you’ve been following Aztec for a while, you would be right to think about Aztec Connect here, which was hugely popular with $17M TVL and over 100,000 active wallets, but was sunset in 2024 to focus on bringing a general-purpose privacy network to life. 

Read on to learn how you’ll be able to import privacy to any L2, using one of the many privacy-focused bridges that are already built. 

The Aztec Network  

Aztec is a fully decentralized, privacy-preserving L2 on Ethereum. You can think of Aztec as a private world computer with full end-to-end programmable privacy. A private world computer extends Ethereum to add optional privacy at every level, from identity and transactions to the smart contracts themselves. 

On Aztec, every wallet is a smart contract that gives users complete control over which aspects they want to make public or keep private. 

Aztec is currently in Testnet, but will have multiple privacy-preserving bridges live for its mainnet launch, unlocking a myriad of privacy preserving features.

Bringing Privacy to You

Now, several bridges, including Wormhole, TRAIN, and Substance, are connecting Aztec to other chains, adding a privacy layer to the L2s you already use. Think of it as a secure tunnel between you and any DeFi app on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, or other major chains.

Here's what changes: You can now use any DeFi protocol without revealing your identity. Furthermore, you can also unlock brand new features that take advantage of Aztec’s private smart contracts, like private DAO voting or private compliance checks. 

Here's what you can do:

• Use DeFi without revealing your portfolio: trade on Uniswap or deposit into Yearn without broadcasting your strategy to the world
• Donate to causes without being tracked: support projects on Base without linking donations to your identity
• Vote in DAOs without others seeing your choices: participate in governance on Arbitrum while keeping your votes private
• Prove you're legitimate without doxxing yourself: pass compliance checks or prove asset ownership without revealing which specific assets you hold
• Access exclusive perks without revealing which NFTs you own: unlock token-gated content on Optimism without showing your entire collection

The apps stay where they are. Your liquidity stays where it is. Your community stays where it is. You just get a privacy upgrade.

How It Actually Works 

Let's follow Alice through a real example.

Alice wants to invest $1,000 USDC into a yield vault on Arbitrum without revealing her identity. 

Step 1: Alice Sends Funds Through Aztec

Alice moves her funds into Aztec's privacy layer. This could be done in one click directly in the app that she’s already using if the app has integrated one of the bridges. Think of this like dropping a sealed envelope into a secure mailbox. The funds enter a private space where transactions can't be tracked back to her wallet.

Step 2: The Funds Arrive at the DeFi Vault

Aztec routes Alice's funds to the Yearn vault on Arbitrum. The vault sees a deposit and issues yield-earning tokens. But there's no way to trace those tokens back to Alice's original wallet. Others can see someone made a deposit, but they have no idea who.

Step 3: Alice Gets Her Tokens Back Privately

The yield tokens arrive in Alice's private Aztec wallet. She can hold them, trade them privately, or eventually withdraw them, without anyone connecting the dots.

Step 4: Alice Earns Yield With Complete Privacy

Alice is earning yield on Arbitrum using the exact same vault as everyone else. But while other users broadcast their entire investment strategy, Alice's moves remain private. 

The difference looks like this:

Without privacy: "Wallet 0x742d...89ab deposited $5,000 into Yearn vault at 2:47 PM"

With Aztec privacy: "Someone deposited funds into Yearn vault" (but who? from where? how much? unknowable).

In the future, we expect apps to directly integrate Aztec, making this experience seamless for you as a user. 

The Developers Behind the Bridges 

While Aztec is still in Testnet, multiple teams are already building bridges right now in preparation for the mainnet launch.

Projects like Substance Labs, Train, and Wormhole are creating connections between Aztec and major chains like Optimism, Unichain, Solana, and Aptos. This means you'll soon have private access to DeFi across nearly every major ecosystem.

Aztec has also launched a dedicated cross-chain catalyst program to support developers with grants to build additional bridges and apps. 

Unifying Liquidity Across Ethereum L2s

L2s have sometimes received criticism for fragmenting liquidity across chains. Aztec is taking a different approach. Instead, Aztec is bringing privacy to the liquidity that already exists. Your funds stay on Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, wherever the deepest pools and best apps already live. Aztec doesn't compete for liquidity, it adds privacy to existing liquidity.

You can access Uniswap's billions in trading volume. You can tap into Aave's massive lending pools. You can deposit into Yearn's established vaults, all without moving liquidity away from where it's most useful.

The Future of Private DeFi

We’re rolling out a new approach to how we think about L2s on Ethereum. Rather than forcing users to choose between privacy and access to the best DeFi applications, we’re making privacy a feature you can add to any protocol you're already using. As more bridges go live and applications integrate Aztec directly, using DeFi privately will become as simple as clicking a button—no technical knowledge required, no compromise on the apps and liquidity you depend on.

While Aztec is currently in testnet, the infrastructure is rapidly taking shape. With multiple bridge providers building connections to major chains and a dedicated catalyst program supporting developers, the path to mainnet is clear. Soon, you'll be able to protect your privacy while still participating fully in the Ethereum ecosystem. 

If you’re a developer and want a full technical breakdown, check out this post. To stay up to date with the latest updates for network operators, join the Aztec Discord and follow Aztec on X.

Transparent OTC Trades Are Holding the Industry Back

OTC trading is fundamental to how crypto markets function. It enables better price negotiations than what you'll find on public order books and facilitates trading of illiquid assets that barely exist on exchanges. Without OTC markets, institutional crypto trading would be nearly impossible. But here's the massive problem: every single OTC transaction leaves a permanent, public trace. 

Let's say you're a fund manager who needs to sell 1,000 BTC for USDC on Base. In a traditional OTC trade, your Bitcoin leaves your wallet and becomes visible to everyone on Bitcoin's blockchain. Through cross-chain settlement, USDC then arrives in your Base wallet, which is also visible to everyone on Base's blockchain. 

At this point, block explorers and analytics firms can connect these transactions through pattern analysis. As a result, your trading patterns, position sizes, and timing become public data, exposing your entire strategy.

This isn't just about privacy; transparent OTC creates serious operational and strategic risks. These same concerns have moved a significant portion of traditional markets to private off-exchange trades. 

Why Traditional Finance Moved to Private Markets

In TradFi, institutions don't execute large trades on public order books for many reasons. In fact, ~13% of all stocks in the US are now traded in dark pools, and more than 50% of trades are now off-exchange. 

They use private networks, dark pools, and OTC desks specifically because:

• Strategy Protection: Your competitors can't front-run your moves
• Better Execution: No market impact from revealing large positions
• Regulatory Compliance: Meet reporting requirements without public disclosure
• Operational Security: Protect proprietary trading algorithms and relationships

While OTC trading is already a major part of the crypto industry, without privacy, true institutional participation will never be practical. 

Now, Aztec is making this possible. 

Moving Whale-Sized Bags Privately on Aztec

We built an open-source private OTC trading system using Aztec Network's programmable privacy features. Because Aztec allows users to have private, programmable, and composable private state, users aren’t limited to only owning and transferring digital assets privately, but also programming and composing them via smart contracts.

If you’re new to Aztec, you can think of the network as a private world computer, with full end-to-end programmable privacy. A private world computer extends Ethereum to add optional privacy at every level, from identity and transactions to the smart contracts themselves. 

To build a private OTC desk, we leveraged all these tools provided by Aztec to implement a working proof of concept. Our private OTC desk is non-custodial and leverages private smart contracts and client-side proving to allow for complete privacy of the seller and buyer of the OTC.

How It Actually Works

For Sellers:

1. Deploy a private escrow contract (only you know it exists at this stage)
2. Initialize contract and set the terms (asset type, quantity, price)
3. Deposit your assets into the contract
4. After it’s been deployed, call a private API (the order book service)

For Buyers:

1. Discover available orders through our privacy-preserving API
2. Select trades that match your criteria
3. Complete the seller's partial note with your payment
4. Execute atomic swap – you get their assets, they get your payment

The Magic: Partial Notes are the technical breakthrough that make collaborative, asynchronous private transactions possible. Sellers create incomplete payment commitments that buyers can finish without revealing the seller's identity. It's like leaving a blank check that only the right person can cash, but neither party knows who the other is.

Privacy guarantees include: 

• Complete Privacy: Neither party knows who they're trading with
• Strategy Protection: Your trading patterns stay private
• Market Impact Minimization: No public signals about large movements
• Non-custodial: Direct peer-to-peer settlement, no intermediaries

Key Innovations

Private Contract Deployment: Unlike public decentralized exchanges where smart contracts are visible on the blockchain, the escrow contracts in this system are deployed privately, meaning that only the participants involved in the transaction know these contracts exist.

Partial Note Mechanism: This system uses cryptographic primitives that enable incomplete commitments to be finalized or completed by third parties, all while preventing those third parties from revealing or accessing any pre-existing information that was part of the original commitment.

Privacy-Preserving Discovery: The orderflow service maintains knowledge of aggregate trading volumes and overall market activity, but it cannot see the details of individual traders, including their specific trade parameters or personal identities.

Atomic Execution: The smart contract logic is designed to ensure that both sides of a trade occur simultaneously in a single atomic operation, meaning that if any part of the transaction fails, the entire transaction is rolled back and neither party's assets are transferred.

Build with us!

Our prototype for this is open-sourced here, and you can read about the proof of concept directly from the developer here. 

We're inviting teams to explore, fork, and commercialize this idea. The infrastructure for private institutional trading needs to exist, and Aztec makes it possible today. Whether you're building a private DEX, upgrading your OTC desk, or exploring new DeFi primitives, this codebase is your starting point. 

The traditional finance world conducts trillions in private OTC trades. It's time to bring that scale to crypto, privately.

To stay up to date with the latest updates for network operators, join the Aztec Discord and follow Aztec on X.

Watch this: Alice sends Zcash. Bob receives USDC on Aztec. Nobody, not even the system facilitating it, knows who Alice or Bob are.

And Bob can now do something with that money. Privately.

This is the connection between private money and a private economy where that money can actually be used.

Zcash has already achieved something monumental: truly private money. It’s the store of value that Bitcoin promised (but made transparent). Like, digital gold that actually stays hidden.

But here's the thing about gold - you don't buy coffee with gold bars. You need an economy where that value can flow, work, and grow. Privately.

Money Under the Mattress

While other projects are trying to bolt privacy onto existing chains as an afterthought, Zcash is one of the oldest privacy projects in Web3. It's achieved what dozens of projects are still chasing: a truly private store of value.

This is critical infrastructure for freedom. The ability to store value privately is a fundamental right, a hedge against surveillance, and a given when using cash. We need a system that provides the same level of privacy guarantees as cash. Right now, there's over $1.1 billion sitting in Zcash's shielded pool, private wealth that's perfectly secure but essentially frozen.

Why frozen? Because the moment that shielded $ZEC tries to do anything beyond basic transfers: earn yield, get swapped for stablecoins, enter a liquidity pool, it must expose itself. The privacy in this format is destroyed.

This isn't Zcash's failure. They built exactly what they set out to build: the world's best private store of value. The failure is that the rest of crypto hasn't built where that value can actually work.

The Privacy Landscape Has an Imbalance

What happens when you want to do more than just send money? What happens when you want privacy after you transfer your money?

Private Digital Money (i.e., “Transfer Privacy,” largely solved by Zcash):

• Zcash: est. 2016
• Everyone else: building variants of digital money at the transaction or identity level
  
  • Monero
  • Ethereum privacy pools
  • 0xbow
  • Payy
  • Every privacy stablecoin project
  • Every confidential L2
  • Every privacy project you've ever heard of

Private World Computer (i.e., After-the-Transfer Privacy):

• Aztec

Everyone else is competing to build better ways to hide money. Zcash has already built the private store of value, and Aztec has built the only way to use hidden money.

The Locked Liquidity Problem

Here's the trillion-dollar question: What good is private money if you can't use it?

Right now, Zcash's shielded pool contains billions in value. This is money in high-security vaults. But unlike gold in vaults that can be collateralized, borrowed against, or deployed, this private value just sits there.

Every $ZEC holder faces two impossible choices:

1. Keep it shielded and forfeit all utility
2. Unshield it to use it and forfeit all privacy

Our demo breaks this false sense of choice. For the first time, shielded value can move to a place where it remains private AND becomes useful.

The Private World Computer

Here's how you can identify whether you’re dealing with a private world computer, or just private digital money:

Without a private world computer (every other privacy solution):

• Receive salary privately → Can't invest it
• Store savings privately → Can't earn yield
• Send money privately → Recipient can't use it privately

With a private world computer (only Aztec):

• Receive salary privately → Invest it privately
• Store savings privately → Earn APY privately
• Send payment privately → Recipient spends it privately

This is basic financial common sense. Your money should grow. It should work. It should be useful.

The technical reality is that this requires private smart contracts. Aztec is building the only way to interact privately with smart contracts. These smart contracts themselves can remain completely hidden. Your private money can finally do what money is supposed to do: work for you.

What We Actually Built

Our demo proves these two worlds can connect:

1. The Vault: Zcash
2. The Engine: Aztec (where private money becomes useful)

We built the bridge between storing privately and doing privately.

The technical innovation - "partial notes" - are like temporary lockboxes that self-destruct after one use. Money can be put privately into these lockboxes, and a key can be privately handed to someone to unlock it. No one knows who put the money in, where the key came from, or who uses the key. You can read more about how they work here. But what matters isn't the mechanism. 

What matters is that Alice's Zcash can become Bob's working capital on Aztec without anyone knowing about either of them.

As a result, Bob receives USDC that he can:

• Earn yield on
• Trade with
• Pay suppliers with
• Build a business on
• All privately

Why This Required Starting from Scratch (and 8 years of building)

You can't bolt privacy onto existing systems. You can't take Ethereum and make it private. You can't take a transparent smart contract platform and add privacy as a feature.

Aztec had to be built from the ground up as a private world computer because after-the-transfer privacy requires rethinking everything:

• How state is managed
• How contracts execute
• How proofs are generated
• How transactions are ordered

This is why there's only one name building fully private smart contracts. From the beginning, Aztec has been inspired by the work Zcash has done to create a private store of value. That’s what led to the vision for a private world computer.

Everyone else is iterating on the same transfer privacy problem. Aztec solves a fundamentally different problem.

The Obvious Future

Once you see it, you can't unsee it: Privacy without utility is only the first step.

Every privacy project will eventually need what Aztec built. Because their users will eventually ask: "Okay, my money is private... now what?"

• Zcash users will want their $ZEC to earn yield
• Privacy pool users will want to do more than just mix
• Private stablecoin users will want to actually… use their stablecoins

This demo that connects Zcash to Aztec is the first connection between the old world (private transfers) and the new world (private everything else).

What This Means

For Zcash Holders: Your shielded $ZEC can finally do something without being exposed.

For Developers: Stop trying to build better mattresses to hide money under. Start building useful applications on the only platform that keeps them private. 

For the Industry: The privacy wars are over. There's transfer privacy (solved by Zcash) and after-the-transfer privacy (just Aztec).

What’s Next? 

This demo is live. The code is open source. The bridge between private money and useful private money exists.

But this is just the beginning. Every privacy project needs this bridge. Every private payment network needs somewhere for those payments to actually be used.

We're not competing with transfer privacy. We're continuing it.

Your private money yearns for the private economy.

Welcome to after-the-transfer privacy. Welcome to Aztec.