DeFi Privacy Bridge Aztec Connect Sunsets After Less Than a Year

Ethereum privacy layer Aztec Network said Monday that it has sunset Azure Connect, a bridge that provided privacy shield for decentralized finance (DeFi) transactions. Azure Connect failed to make it to the one-year mark, having gone live in July 2022.

“The immense research invested into Aztec Connect will be usable and indeed critical to the development of our next-gen product," wrote the Aztec team in a Medium post. "Having an encrypted rollup live and in production gives us confidence in our shift to focusing on a fully programmable version."

Aztec Connect will disable payments from front-ends such as zkMoney next week. Users can withdraw funds with no fees for a year. While withdrawals will always be possible, the act itself will become more technically challenging after that one-year mark.

With the lapsing, Aztec made all of the Aztec Connect protocol entirely open source and encouraged the community to continue building. The company said it’s ready to financially back an independently operated version of the bridge.

Next up, Aztec Network will focus on two main products: Noir, a universal language for zero-knowledge cryptography, and a next-generation encrypted zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup.

Read more: What Are Rollups? ZK Rollups and Optimistic Rollups Explained