Privateness blockchain platform Aztec has introduced that it is going to be shutting down Aztec Join, the community’s privateness infrastructure that acts because the encryption layer for Ethereum. The community was launched in July 2022 and has since amassed greater than 100,000 customers. Nonetheless, the corporate has now formally introduced that it is going to be closing down the service.
The closure of Aztec Join will contain disabling deposits from front-ends like zk.cash and zkpay.finance on March 17. Customers will have the ability to withdraw their funds from Aztec Join with no charges for one 12 months, however withdrawals will change into considerably extra burdensome after March 21, 2024, in line with a weblog put up by Aztec. The corporate has advisable that customers withdraw their funds as quickly as attainable.
From March 2024, Aztec will now not run a sequencer, that means the present system will now not publish rollup blocks processing Aztec Join transactions. “Contract permissions can be renounced, and all rollup performance can be ceased,” the announcement reads. Nonetheless, Aztec has absolutely open-sourced the complete Aztec Join protocol, and it encourages the Aztec neighborhood to fork, deploy, and function a brand new model of the system. “We might like to see an independently-operated Aztec Join and are able to fund it,” Aztec mentioned.
In keeping with the announcement, the shutdown of Aztec Join marks a milestone within the growth of a decentralized general-use encrypted blockchain. Earlier than launching Aztec Join in July 2022, Aztec first experimented with utilizing a zk-Rollup with Aztec 1, which was “gradual, inefficient, expensive” and restricted in performance to “primary non-public transfers.”
Aztec’s deal with privateness has been a major consider its recognition amongst blockchain customers. Its privateness infrastructure is designed to assist customers defend their monetary knowledge and transaction historical past from third-party entities, thereby sustaining their privateness. The corporate has been growing privacy-oriented options to enhance the effectivity and safety of blockchain-based monetary transactions.
The closure of Aztec Join is a major transfer for the blockchain platform, but it surely stays to be seen how the Aztec neighborhood will react to the information. As the corporate has inspired the neighborhood to fork, deploy, and function a brand new model of the system, it’s attainable {that a} new, independently-operated model of Aztec Join might emerge sooner or later. Nonetheless, for now, customers of the platform might want to withdraw their funds earlier than the closure of the service on March 21, 2024.
