Bio
Zachary (Zac) Williamson is Co-Founder and CEO of Aztec and President and Chairman of the Board of Aztec Foundation. He co-founded Aztec in 2017 with Joe Andrews, Tom Pocock, and Arnaud Schenk. Aztec is building programmable privacy infrastructure for Ethereum, using zero-knowledge proof technology to enable confidential smart contracts and private DeFi. Aztec Foundation launched in 2025 as the independent governance body for the Aztec Network protocol.
Williamson holds a PhD in particle physics from the University of Oxford; exact degree title and graduation year have not been independently confirmed from Oxford's official records and should be verified before stating definitively. He is a co-author and co-inventor of PLONK, a widely used universal zero-knowledge proof system; the PLONK paper was co-authored with Ariel Gabizon and Zac Williamson among others — he should not be described as its sole inventor. He also co-developed Barretenberg, Aztec's open-source ZK proving library, with the Aztec engineering team.
As of August 2026, Aztec's network is in Alpha. A proving-system vulnerability was disclosed in the Alpha V5 version; users and developers should treat Alpha software as pre-production. Aztec V6 was planned for later in 2026; its deployment status should be verified from official Aztec network communications before characterizing it as live. Noir, Aztec's domain-specific language for ZK circuit programming, is an open-source project credited to the Aztec Labs engineering team.
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