What brought me into this space, how has my five-years journey been, and where I’m heading? Why am I in crypto?

It's been some time since I last pondered a question like this—perhaps I've never truly considered it deeply, despite devoting all my time to coding in this space. Nevertheless, I decided to do so because after grinding without a job over the past year, I feel it’s good timing to reflect on what I’ve done in this space in the last five years to shed light on myself and solidify my dedication to crypto.

Given that I was neither a software engineer, trader, nor someone passionately engaged in political thoughts that naturally align with Bitcoin and crypto, it’s still a mystery, even to me, what exactly got me into this mysterious and geeky realm. I’m feeling compelled to retrace my past journey to figure it out.

So, what follows in the first half of this article is a story of how a naive and clueless nineteen-year-old who just finished a university exam with little funds, no idea of how programming codes work, and no familiarity with fancy socioeconomic concepts gradually got dragged down this mighty, fascinating rabbit hole.

Btw, it’s still somewhat ironic that I, despite being an anon, am now writing about my personal journey. My pseudonym, inspired by my favorite film, Porco Rosso, mirrors the protagonist's role as a bounty hunter—akin to my own path as a developer in the crypto space in recent years. After all, my pseudonym turned out to be just a nickname. At some point, I became open, turning on my camera during calls and attending IRL events like hackathons.

2017: No Attention

My introduction to crypto…? It was when one of my closest friends introduced it to me. This is when I heard about Bitcoin for the first time. Indeed, it was in the middle of the crazy bull run. However, for whatever reason, I didn’t find it intriguing enough and pay any attention to it, partly because I was extremely busy studying for university exams.

2018 - 2019: Clueless Roaming with DeFiciency

My first experience in “crypto” was utterly awful.

To give some context, the situation in the crypto industry was the aftermath of one of the craziest bubble bursts in its history, and people were increasingly disbelieving in the state of the market. Losses were mounting. This is typically when people are desperate and tempted to get involved in dubious deals to cover their losses. Meanwhile, my boss, the founder of a tiny startup consisting of him and me as an intern, asked me, “Are you interested in crypto? Why don’t we create an online crypto media platform?”. I obliviously reacted, saying, “Gotcha”.

Full disclosure: it went so horribly that I was assigned to write articles about almost certainly scam ICO projects to earn referral fees paid by their affiliate programs. Welp, this drops a hurting question: was I one of the crypto scammers -- the people I despise and feel disgusted by more than anything in the entire universe? I can’t resist making an excuse that I just had no idea, unable to tell what is legit or fraudulent. Such a deep regret. Though fortunately, the website never gained traction: almost all these shitty contents remained unpublished.

It could’ve been a lot worse, but it’s not that I devoted myself to producing that pure trash; I also read a lot about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BlockChain through this work, which was indeed fascinating and meaningful enough to give me a bit more insight into distinguish credible information from nonsense. Later, I corrected the course and decided to leave this startup to start an internship at a coworking space run by OmiseGo in Tokyo -- a decision that introduced me to a genuine community.

Many technical and non-technical meetups held by various crypto projects took place, such as Polkadot, MakerDAO, and 0x, as well as local startups in this coworking space. I, a support staff member who helped organize these events, was often the least knowledgeable person in the room. I didn’t speak English at the time, which was honestly embarrassing. Above all, the accumulated frustration of knowing nothing was immense, propelling me to delve deeper into the rabbit hole.

As somebody said, “Crypto is the rabbit hole of academics.”, it was full of fun because I also had to jump into several rabbit holes that underpin the basis for understanding Bitcoin and crypto, such as CS, cryptography, math, economics, politics, philosophy, and so on. Even now, I’m not an expert in any of these fields, but rather still explore tirelessly and probably can never get out. You never get used to it: a lack of boredom and limitless stimulation.

Over time, my focus gravitated towards financial applications, later known as DeFi, over anything else, probably because of my general interest in Finance and Fintech. Before encountering crypto, I was casually doing research about lending unicorns, such as SoFi, to grasp why the student loan problem is that endemic, which tormented my childhood friend, and learn about potential solutions.

A lending protocol, which doesn’t exist anymore, called Dharma, was particularly thrilling for me. It’s a P2P lending platform built on Ethereum. It felt like a trustless and permissionless “sharing economy of money” on a global scale. That is mind-blowing. Imagining, for instance, that I can lend DAI to a stranger who lives in a remote Indian village, helping them to run a small business without the layers of bureaucratic permissions and costs imposed by banks was wonderful!

I embarked on writing research articles about these DeFi projects for several online crypto media and research collectives, getting paid, and blog-posting outside work. I also played around with their apps with toy-level UIs on testnets/mainnets, sharing ideas and engaging in discussion with other like-minded people IRL / on Twitter. It was just the happy old days of geeking out. It was around this time that a blur but firm determination evolved in my mind: contributing to this ecosystem to help bring DeFi and crypto to fruition and what I had envisioned.

How could I make it a reality? Clearly, I had no practical skills to pursue such a goal besides some random crypto knowledge, with programming know-how, no proficiency in English, and no penny for investment. Of course, I gave a shot to read and do something with those DeFi contracts like Dharma and Maker’s DAI ( formerly SAI ) but I couldn’t obtain any meaningful learnings. Thus, my goal, which is more of a starting line, was drawn clearly: 1) become proficient in English and 2) be capable of writing codes. I still remember a tweet posted by a Japanese crypto OG I respected.

”Unless you can use English or code, you are effectively dead in the crypto industry. Doesn’t matter whether or not you work in Japan.”

This led me to cease all internship/freelance work except a remote non-crypto tech writer job and fly away to Bangalore, India, only to learn English at the cheapest cost. Also, my rationale or intuition was that I shouldn’t be doing so in a place where people never speak English but in a world where people do ( with a distinct flavor, jk ).

During my three-month stint in India, besides 1-2 hours of work in the morning, I devoted myself exclusively to studying English, especially speaking. Then, after obtaining an intermediate-level score on the IELTS exam, I decided to leave India to get closer to the epic center of the crypto community: Berlin, Germany. This move marked the end of 2019 and the dawn of the COVID era.

2020 - 2021: The golden days of DeFi

In Germany, where I stayed for a year amid the depressing COVID lockdown, I finally began to learn coding solidity and invest in crypto seriously while continuing my English study from time to time.

At the beginning of the year, while attending a private English school in Berlin, I missed the days of dabbling around crypto, which pushed me to head to France to attend ETHCC[3] in March.

One of the most inspirational and eye-opening talks was Mel Gelderman’s “living a DeFi life with Monolith”. Monolith is a self-custodial DeFi smart contract wallet that offers a debit card. It enabled card payments directly debited from an ERC20 balance in any shop in Europe without fiat currency, which captivated me. Not to mention that it’s a smart contract wallet that integrates DeFi features, which is less extensive than my all-time favorite SCW, Instadapp, but swapping via Uniswap on your phone was revolutionary for the time.

Also, at the venue, I met a French guy who told me the story of traveling around the world with his crypto savings comprising 100% of his net worth. Over the course of the trip, he searched for random crypto owners online and met them in person to cash his crypto out for expenses at each destination. Coincidentally, the Monolith guy also shared a similar personal story. This was probably the first time I had met people who only owned crypto and zero fiat. It was astonishing, humbling, and even humiliating, which led me to do the same thing later; it felt like that’s one of the metrics for indicating the degree of commitment.

Months later, amid COVID-19 hitting Europe and the market tumbling, I was back in Berlin preparing to pause my English study to spend more time in crypto in any way while doing a bit of remote gig work, including crypto writing / translating jobs. What I did first was to put all my money 3k$ into ETH. At that time, I owed around 5k$ in debt to my parents, which meant my net worth was negative. But it didn’t matter. Later, the Monolith card I ordered was delivered to my home, and I fully embraced it, only spending with the card but fiat. I was like, “ETH is the money, and Monolith is my bank account”, proud of myself for going full crypto.

Until the end of 2021, while sometimes relocating from Germany to Japan, Bulgaria, and Georgia, I simultaneously went back and forth between money juggling in DeFi, English, and Solidity. However, due to the market condition, the focus mostly ended up on the first one, which unresistingly distracted and entertained me. I just listed below what happened and what I did from mid-2020 to late 2021 since I can’t describe all of the stories about each event in sentences that would need five more articles.

DeFi

• Obtained a not-insubstantial amount of BTC and ETH for the first time

• Had leveraged ETH long on Aave, Liquity through Instadapp

• DeFi Summer: Longed DeFi blue chips and Food coins and sometimes got rekt

• Being a human sacrifice for every nascent & experimental decentralized/algo stable, LUSD, RAI, AMPL, FEI, BASIS CASH, ESD, DSD, FLOAT, etc

• DeFi tokens airdropped, UNI, 1INCH, DYDX, ENS, and many more

Coding

• Embarked on self-learn solidity, JavaScript, and React

• Built a PoC of ETH-short-hedged stablecoin in a BUILD program held by Tokyo Univ

• Built an arbitrage bot for DPI, Defi Pulse Index, and failed with > 1k$ losses in gas

• Forked Liquity with modifications on RSK and got a hackathon prize

• Built a smart account layer for extensional asset management that, for example, allows for taking a leverage position on top of Cream

• Won a hackathon prize. - Running Bitcoin node for the first time.

Misc

• Dropped out of my uni with no credits earned, which I stopped attending in 2019.

At the end of the day, these wild times left me some chunk of money, which currently allows me to be unemployed with little financial concerns and allocate my entire time to enhance my dev skills and experiences greatly, at the expense of mental exhaustion and feelings of isolation that I depressed me at the beginning of 2022.

2022: Exhaustion and Break

I moved to Georgia in June 2021 for taxation reasons while the previous bull run was still in swing. Since I barely socialized but kept sitting in front of my laptop and monitors at home, my mental health was undoubtedly worn out, because of the loneliness I recognized but also due to the purposelessness stemming from the fact I did not spend an inch of time building around that time. It was apparent in my heart that I wouldn’t be fulfilled even if I continued engaging in casino games, moving hundreds of thousands of coins daily. In retrospect, 2020-21 was such a dark age.

Yet, I didn’t plunge back into coding immediately but ended up mostly staying away from crypto in the first half of 2022, focusing more on meeting people in real life, making friends, and becoming more like a human. I have no regrets about this hiatus because, thanks to that time, my current social relationship with the people around me is well-balanced. In late 2022, thankfully, the urge to resume my original aspirations slowly reemerged.

2023-24: What I think and do now

Since my work over the years 2023/24 can be seen on my portfolio page, here, instead of storytelling, I attempt to introduce the technical trends that fascinate me as a developer and elaborate on why I’ve built mostly around them, such as wallets and privacy-preserving solutions, over the past year.

Bitcoin

I’d like to touch on Bitcoin before diving into DeFi or, rather, to frame Bitcoin in the context of DeFi. I’d argue that Bitcoin is the first-ever materialization of DeFi and still remains at its pinnacle. It demonstrated that money, one of the most fundamental financial primitives, can be engineered in such a trustless and decentralized manner.

Nevertheless, it is just money, and its underlying technology, the bitcoin blockchain, is technically incapable of fully nurturing the full spectrums of financial applications, that would allow its native currency, Bitcoin, to be utilized with complete trustlessness. Micheal Salyor and other proponents tend to argue that trusted financial institutions can adopt BTC as a new asset class into their products. However, it would greatly diminish the point of using Bitcoin if the supporting financial structures remained centralized. BTC traded on CEXs, Grayscale, and Revolut is not Bitcoin as it is custodial.

This is where Ethereum came in, inspired by Satoshi's ethos and visions, to unlock the full capabilities of P2P digital currencies like Bitcoin. Its native asset, ETH, doesn’t have the underlying constraints BTC faces and is widely used as digital money across different financial applications as the most significant source of liquidity.

My speculative view is that Ethereum is ultimately an extensional execution layer that can support an application called Bitcoin, which offers sufficient credibility but a slightly inferior decentralization and robustness given pre-mine and the DAO hard fork. This take wouldn’t make sense without a sufficiently trustless bridge between bitcoin and ethereum that provides secure wrapped BTCs on Ethereum. Unfortunately, the current state of the advancement in BTC bridges essentially acts as a moat that prevents BTC from being used as money in DeFi.

Well, touching on Bitcoin might be irrelevant to the following sections, let alone it’s barely mentioned in my story so far, but I couldn’t resist putting my thoughts on it as it is no doubt relevant to the question “Why I’m here” and Bitcoin is definitely one of the most aesthetic and captivating phenomena that resonated with me hard. Indeed, BTC is the only asset I didn’t decide to sell in the previous cycle.

DeFi

The reasons I don’t really intend to work on DeFi on Ethereum anymore boil down to two points outlined below.

1) No longer the frontier

Simply put, I missed the train. I was not ready and capable enough as a developer when DeFi Summer —the golden days of DeFi— rolled around, and a bunch of financial primitives emerged on Ethereum L1. Nowadays, DEXs, lending protocols, perps, and options are already up and running beautifully out there, and seemingly, there is only a little room to innovate further.

Admittedly, I'm likely overlooking interesting developments because I no longer follow the latest DeFi space trends, although some still draw my attention. There seem to be very ambitious projects in the lending space, such as permissionless, oracle-less lending protocols like Timeswap and Ajna. Given that old-school protocols relying on permissioned assets and external price feeds, such as Aave and Compound, still dominate the most liquidity in the lending arena, it’s possible that those more trustless protocols could challenge these incumbents.

But anyway, building lending protocol per se is not something I’ve been passionate about most in DeFi. My primary interest always lies in the arena of decentralized/algorithmic stablecoin -- a niche space I’d still be eager to explore and build even on Ethereum L1.

2) decentralized stablecoin is challenging.

In my opinion, one of the most significant building blocks still missing in decentralized finance is decentralized money. USDT and USDC are centralized and not censorship-resistant, and DAI pivoted to have centralized collaterals, one of the most disappointing events in crypto history personally. Crypto-backed ones like LUSD and RAI have been struggling to scale with the price being relatively more unstable. Other experimentations with exogenous collateral, such as ESD and UST, tragically failed. Some claim that ETH can serve as money, and its price detonated in USD will be stabilized over time. But frankly, this sounds less plausible than something like “progressive decentralization”.

That is why I dedicated myself to learning how existing stablecoins work, tried to contribute to the scale of newcomers by putting real money into them, and attempted to build something during 2020-2021. But it turned out to be overwhelmingly challenging, fundamentally. So, I don’t think I’d work on it again for the time being unless I ever found an extraordinary novel idea.

Account Abstraction

It’s not like I had been following the past development of protocol-level account abstraction on Ethereum, but ERC4337 and the possibilities it could open up interest me because of the natural feeling of excitement as a big fan of smart contract wallets.

In retrospect, I’ve always been inclined to use smart contract wallets to interact with crypto for various purposes due to their extensible functionalities for security and better UX. As mentioned, I used Monolith to spend IRL with its card and Instadapp to create sophisticated positions on DeFi protocols. Plus, Safe has been the primary wallet that secures most of my coins on Ethereum.

Since I’m an anti-CEX user, this seems like a natural consequence. EOAs can never have the technical capacity by itself to offer debit cards, advanced asset management options like leverage, or security-enhanced instruments like account recovery and 2FA. All of them are something only smart contract wallets or CEXs offer, e.g., the Binance card and Binance Authenticator.

Most importantly, working on AA made sense for a developer like me who was searching for unexplored and ambitious technological trends that could accelerate crypto’s mass adoption and shape the Ethereum trajectory over the next few years. In Q1 2023, I created three different AA modules on zkSync: spend limit, trade limit, and webauthn signature scheme. I didn’t intend to make them real projects but build them to showcase what can be made possible with native account abstraction on zkSync.

Especially, working on the webauthn signature scheme that allows users to sign transactions with a fingerprint was particularly exciting. Imagine creating crypto wallets with your fingerprint instead of taking note of seed phrases and signing tx the same way without seeing Metamask’s pop-up and pressing the approve button. Amazingly, we’ve already seen new wallets that actually offer this feature are about to launch on mainnets, like Clave and Base’s smart wallet, in the past few months.

Unfortunately, we confronted a practical issue: verifying the ECDSA signature with the p256 curve on-chain cost more than 1 million gas which is prohibitively expensive. However, interestingly enough, while exploring an alternative approach to this problem, I fell into a rabbit hole: zero-knowledge proofs.

Zero Knowledge Proofs

The way zero-knowledge proofs can be applied to the issue above shifts from verifying the signature generated through webauthn on smart contract to proving the correct execution of the verification off-chain through the zk-circuit and subsequently verifying the proof on-chain. It turned out that with Noir, a zkDSL for writing zero-knowledge programs that has a built-in library to verify ECDSA signature, the gas cost is approximately 3x cheaper than the current on-chain verification.

This blew my mind and led me to explore other applications of zero-knowledge proofs that could be employed to not only off-load computation outside smart contracts for gas efficiency but also enhance the UX and security of smart accounts by adding privacy. Later, in May 2023, at the ETHPrague Hackathon, I built AnonAA, an ERC4337-based social recovery wallet with private guardians implemented in Noir, which got prizes from the Ethereum Foundation (ERC4337 team) and Scroll.

After this hackathon, I went deep-dive into zero-knowledge proofs to explore more potential use cases at the intersection of AA and ZK, especially privacy features, because I came to think that a lack of privacy leads to less security and UX, not just for smart accounts, but for DeFi too or quite generally as long as you transact on this transparent state machine. zk techs seem to have the potential to drastically change the blockchain landscape. What matters is not transparency but verifiability that zk can offer without sacrificing privacy.

However, not many live applications employed zkp, as it’s promising but still immature and difficult to integrate. One of the few examples I found was Railgun, which works as a privacy DeFi layer for EVMs. Their flagship product, Railway Wallet, functions as a DeFi smart account with privacy. It looked so interesting that I couldn't help but build something on top. Soon later, I created a private payment app at ETH Rome.

Difficulty and Limitation of ZK Privacy in DeFi on EVMs

I’ve come to recognize the inherent limitations: it’s quite challenging to design a system that can fully protect privacy and is still undeniably costly. The degree of privacy you can retain is still greatly constrained by the fully transparent nature of EVMs, and verifying zk proofs on-chain is still expensive, especially on Ethereum L1. Below, I’ll discuss Railgun as a primary example of limitations in adding full privacy to DeFi, as it’s the most successful protocol by TVL at the time of writing, even though I’m also aware of other intriguing approaches, such as Nocturne and Firm Protocol.

With Railway Wallet, for instance, users can interact with DeFi protocols, such as Uniswap and Aave, using any ERC20 tokens shielded to their private wallet in which the balances are only visible to them. But once you make a swap TX from the wallet, say, converting MKR for UNI, the information of this on-chain transaction becomes public. It’s not that DeFi transactions are entirely private, but the entrance and exit to/from the privacy realm can only be private.

Therefore, there are couple of things both users and developers should be cautious not to compromise privacy mistakenly.

• Asset Fungibility

The fungibility of the asset in the sense of privacy is largely dependent on three critical factors: the unit, relative size and type.

First, as for the fungibility in the sense of unit, consider the scenario where you shield a specific amount of ETH, say, 15.31 ETH, to Railgun and unshield the same amount later for mixing your funds using different addresses for shielding and unshielding. This might associate the shielding address with the unshilding address as the same amount is moved on-chain. Tornado also has this issue and mitigates this risk by only allowing for deposits with specific non-sensitive amounts, like 0.1, 1, 10, and 100 ETH. But Railgun doesn’t take this measurement and keeps flexibility in deposit/withdraw amounts, essentially reducing privacy to some extent.

Secondly, the size of the asset shouldn’t be too large relative to the total liquidity of the same asset in the pool. For instance, if you shield 30 ETH to a shielded pool with a total size of only 50ETH, visible on-chain, there’s no doubt that a large trade over 20-30 ETH coming out of the system would likely be from you. Your privacy depends on the liquidity pool's size, which can be phrased as a chicken-and-egg problem in on-chain asset privacy solutions. Note that you should be more vigilant about this issue when the shielded/unshielded tokens are relatively minor with pools less liquid in the system.

Lastly, the fact that relatively unique assets can easily lead to leakage indicates that using non-fungible assets, NFTs, in this solution is arguably pointless.

• Necessary Interval

In these privacy-focused transactions, the likelihood of linking the source to the destination addresses increases if the time interval between depositing and withdrawing is minimal. Tornado addresses this by allowing users to wait for an arbitrary amount of time before withdrawing (claiming), but this undermines UX as users sometimes expect mixing processes to be instantaneous.

The same is true for another example like a zk-enabled private OTC trade in which two entities exchange different tokens based upon a pre-agreed, hidden exchange rate via an escrow contract. Both parties lock their selling tokens on the escrow contract to provide the interval time. At the time of exchange, tokens don’t move out of the contract but can be claimed at any time after the settlement.

• A Dedicated Relayer Per Protocol

All the solutions that provide asset privacy, such as Tornado, Railgun, zkBoB, and Firm, run their own relayers or relayer networks. It protects user privacy when they take certain actions, such as withdrawing shielded assets and calling external contracts. As far as I observe, the way these relayers work is tailored to each of their different requirements, namely, zk circuits and smart contracts, and it seems technically infeasible to build a one-size-fits-all relayer across different zk solutions on EVMs.

This challenge extends beyond financial apps. I’ve been building SafeRecover, a Safe module that provides various private recovery solutions to Safe owners, such as a private backup signer and social recovery with private guardians. This app also needs a relayer to provide complete privacy for private guardians, allowing them to recover accounts without sending the transaction themselves.

If there is no such thing as EOA, or msg.sender , sender information can be hidden in some ways, this wouldn’t be the problem.

• Expressiveness

Railgun system has developed +50 zk circuits to support a wide range of arbitrary, complex transactions through DeFi/NFT on-chain. However, what can be done within the Railgun system, which offers complete privacy, is only asset transfer: users can privately transfer assets to another Railgun user, which doesn’t make any on-chain record of the token movements or the calls to external contracts.

On the other hand, all actions that interact with contracts outside entail the above limitations and challenges, as transactions sent from Railgun contract leave immutable records on-chain, like which tokens move in/out to/from and which external contract addresses and methods are called.

If these external contracts’ functionalities, such as AMM, are replicated within the Railgun system, these problems could surely be resolved. Nonetheless, building new logic would effectively require writing new circuits for each additional private operation. I’m sure this would neither be a viable path for Railgun nor one it’s willing to head to. None of the privacy protocols built on top of Ethereum that we see working has accomplished general-purpose private executions within their systems. What if we had such a thing…? This is the gap new players like Aleo and Aztec aim to fill.

Aztec

Traditional blockchains/rollups are inherently transparent, with all transactions and states visible to everyone, to ensure the most integral property: verifiability. However, as a result, they sacrifice individual users' privacy.

A hypothesis, which is no longer quite speculative, that zk can maintain verifiability without compromising privacy changes the status quo. In other words, transparency was a necessary condition for achieving verifiability, but on the blockchain with optional private states enabled by zk, as Aztec does, it becomes merely a sufficient condition. Transparency and privacy are no longer mutually exclusive, enabling blockchain to support a broader range of use cases.

I mentioned Aleo, but it’s a no-brainer that I lean toward Aztec over any other privacy L1s because of its decision to build a zk-rollup on top of Ethereum, leveraging the security and network effect of the most robust, decentralized, and battle-tested settlement layer.

Aztec is a zk-rollup with both public and private states: while public states are handled similarly to other L2 zk-rollups, private states are managed through UTXO notes. As far as I know, it’s the only project that tackles the development of privacy blockchain as an L2 on Ethereum. Noir, a domain-specific language for writing smart contracts, not circuits, offers highly expressive programmability, allowing developers to build smart contract applications with private states on Aztec.

The problems pointed out above, such as asset fungibility and interval, are less troublesome on Aztec as tokens with private balances can be deposited and withdrawn to/from contracts through private function calls, which don’t reveal the sender address as well as the contract address. Additionally, there is no need for a relayer thanks to its private nature and protocol-level native account abstraction in which no EOAs exist, but every single account is a smart contract.

Over the past half year, I’ve been building several PoC applications, ranging from DeFi to Wallet to Game. This number-guessing game called Numer0n, where two players compete to guess the opponent’s secret numbers first, and these numbers are stored privately on a smart contract, is one of the most distinct showcases for exhibiting how crucial the private state is in building an on-chain game. This game includes specific items that allow players to get hints about the opponent’s number and alter their own number, adding layers of strategy and enjoyment.

I wouldn’t say that it is impossible to build Numer0n on Ethereum if you utilize zero-knowledge proofs, but it would certainly be way more technically challenging. On EVMs, for instance, you can “store” private data in a way that writes the hash of hidden information, but it can’t literally be queried and modified. At best, it can be compared with the passed input of a hash that returns a boolean value. This is far from having a private state that affords more flexibility and expressiveness.

I recently implemented a session-key-like feature on the AztecSnap wallet I’m building to enhance the UX of Numer0n. This feature allows players to blind-sign the transactions -- guessing the opponent’s secret number -- without invoking the MM confirmation pop-up only during the game, making the user actions smoother and less intrusive. Under the hood, the players’ account contract has the ability to set an additional signer to send a transaction with a specific target and selector to another newly created account with a new key pair on their behalf.

This functionality highlights the advantages of Aztec's native account abstraction, which facilitates the easy addition of custom signature schemes to accounts. The significance of the fact that the public keys of both original and session-key signers are private is also unignorable if you think about the risk of accidentally leaking either of the private keys. As I said before, privacy is gud for account security.

All that being said, Aztec is still an infant, only having local development called Sandbox. It is basically the Anvil of Aztec, emulating the behaviors of a rollup with no effective privacy. Nobody is sure if it’s gonna take off and be prevalent at a substantial level in the future. But I can’t stress more that we gotta strive to make it accomplish so not only for the reasons written above but also to avoid the worst consequence of blockchain technologies: it becomes the greatest surveillance tool of all time.

Last thoughts

I honestly didn’t expect this article to be this long, with over 6k word counts and 35k letters, articulating genuine thoughts turned out to be quite hard, but this writing was more fun than I thought and worth consuming energy to remind me of the original reasons and purposes that brought me here and gain a clearer and deeper understanding of my vision. Also, since I’m generally bad at giving speeches about myself and my thoughts, this makes it easier for me to explain things to people.

2023-2024 is extremely fun and productive so far as I’ve been able to hop around anything that interested me, though, I was a bit enjoying myself too blindedly. However, the knowledge and experiences obtained were so significant that I have no doubt that AA and ZK are ground-breaking trends that will positively impact this industry in the coming months/years. And I’ll almost certainly continue my work and contributions to these areas as much as I can. Importantly, I feel like I should take greater responsibility in some ways, like collaborating with others and founding serious projects, to scale up the current things I’m delving into.