Morning Edition · Thursday, August 6, 2026Published at 1:33 AM EDT · New York

Aztec's Alpha V5 Puts Client-Side Proving in Users' Hands, and a Hidden-Information Game Is the First Test

The privacy rollup cut fully private transaction costs by roughly half and block times from 14 seconds to 6, and a port of Dark Forest is now running on it.

Aztec, the privacy-focused layer-2 network on Ethereum, is running its Alpha V5 release. Governance approved the upgrade in late June and the network launched the version on 21 July. The central change is client-side proving, which lets a p…