Aztec closes $17 million Series A led by Paradigm and other investors

The London-based startup Aztec closed a $17 million Series A round, led by Paradigm.

We’re thrilled to announce that Aztec Network has raised a $17 million Series A led by @paradigm to bring programmable privacy to Web3. pic.twitter.com/PiC50vWdwb

— Aztec (@aztecnetwork) December 16, 2021

The round also included Variant Fund, Nascent, IMToken, Scalar Capital, DeFi Alliance, IOSC Ventures, Zero Knowledge Validator, and previous investors — a_capital, Ethereal Ventures and Libertus Capital.

The funds will be used to advance the technology of programmable privacy for Ethereum built on ZK-Rollups.

The Aztec standard, known as PLONK, enables a two-tier transaction-processing system. The solution delivers cheaper transactions (up to 100x cheaper than Ethereum) and provides ‘verifiable privacy’, concealing the sender, recipient and transaction amount.

The startup announced the launch on the Aztec Connect testnet, a private bridge for DeFi — the Ethereum ecosystem. Users can conduct confidential transfers and save on transaction fees.

The developers promised to unveil the Connect SDK, which will allow any Ethereum project to integrate Aztec Connect.

Earlier in November, the Polygon team presented an L2 solution based on ZK-Rollups and released its central component — a virtual machine that uses the zk-STARKs protocol as the underlying proof system.

In August 2021, Polygon acquired the Hermez Network platform, a platform specializing in ZK-Rollups-based second-layer scaling solutions. At the time, the project said it would allocate $1 billion toward the development of related products.

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