Announcing Aztec Sandbox: The Endgame for Smart Contract Privacy

Welcome to the Aztec Labs Developer Dispatch: The Latest Technical News on Aztec and Noir.

Announcing Aztec Sandbox, The Endgame for Smart Contract Privacy

Yesterday on the zkSummit10 mainstage, Aztec Labs announced Aztec Sandbox: A local developer environment for building applications on Aztec.

Aztec is designed to be the endgame for blockchain privacy – the most ambitious and complete solution for privacy-first blockchain applications ever attempted.

The Sandbox is the first major milestone for this project, allowing devs to write applications that leverage a full suite of privacy primitives. All enabled by an intuitive software development environment that abstracts the complicated mechanisms necessary to protect user privacy.

What comes in the box?

Aztec Sandbox is a comprehensive software release providing devs with a fast, lightweight local Aztec node, with features similar to Ethereum’s Ganache or Anvil local node packages.

Alongside Aztec’s local node testing environment, the Sandbox includes powerful tools and frameworks that allow developers to write and test smart contracts.

The Sandbox is the starting point for Aztec smart contract and application developers.

Aztec’s smart contract examples include a broad swath of use cases:

• Public and private token contracts

• Private DeFi

• Oracle price feeds

• Air-drop contracts

• Two-party private escrow

• Account contracts that can privately validate account credentials

Where does Noir come in?

Aztec Labs first developed Noir as a standalone, open-source, universal language for zero-knowledge programming. Noir is designed to be compatible across proving systems while also being verifiable to any chain, not just Aztec.

​​It's no surprise then that we've chosen Noir as a basis for writing smart contracts on Aztec. Using Noir, we've written a collection of functions, types, methods, state variables, annotations, etc. which together provide a rich, syntactically pleasing framework, to aid developers in writing intuitive and legible private smart contracts.

Imaginatively, we called this framework Aztec.nr.

With Aztec.nr, Noir now fits hand-in-glove with Aztec. Noir developers now have access to the best privacy infrastructure for their applications.

Noir developers: it’s time to come home.

Stay tuned for more

Watch this space for additional updates on Aztec and Noir. Have questions? Want to interact with other developers?

Join our team

Aztec Labs is on the lookout for talented engineers, cryptographers, and business people to accelerate our vision of encrypted Ethereum.