# Aztec **Published by:** [fairish](https://paragraph.com/@fairish/) **Published on:** 2023-05-28 **URL:** https://paragraph.com/@fairish/aztec ## Content What is Aztec? Aztec is a Layer 2 zk-rollup, designed to enable programmable privacy, that will run on Ethereum. It will allow developers to build fully programable, privacy preserving smart contracts, with composable call semantics using our ZK-Snark programming language, Noir. Why? A public blockchain utilizes a peer-to-peer network and a consensus protocol to establish the correct record of events. The core unit of intent (a transaction) is a request to update state, based on the logic of a predefined program. The blockchain node, computes this state update and records it on a shared ledger. The correctness of the ledger is enforced by other nodes "checking" the work of the current node -- only possible as the transactions and their data are public and visible to anyone. Ethereum is an example of a public blockchain, that enables the processing of transactions with arbitrary, Turing complete computation. Aztec is an encrypted blockchain, where the core unit of intent is a zero-knowledge proof, not a transaction request. The zero-knowledge proof, proves the correct execution of a specific transaction and any resultant state updates. Individual transaction proofs are recursively aggregated or "rolled up" using a zk-rollup construction, for final verification on Ethereum. Source : Aztec.network ## Publication Information - [fairish](https://paragraph.com/@fairish/): Publication homepage - [All Posts](https://paragraph.com/@fairish/): More posts from this publication - [RSS Feed](https://api.paragraph.com/blogs/rss/@fairish): Subscribe to updates