Aztec Network

Users can permissionlessly become a sequencer by staking 200 K AZTEC to join the queue and wait to obtain committee-based block production rights. If the pseudo-randomly sampled committees censor proposals, anyone who bonds 332 M AZTEC will join the escape hatch candidate set. Every 2d 23h, a candidate is pseudo-randomly selected to propose and prove checkpoints fully autonomously. A candidate remains in the set until they are selected or leave voluntarily.

SNARKs are succinct zero knowledge proofs that ensure state correctness, but require trusted setup.

State diffs needed to reconstruct the L2 state are published in Ethereum blobs. Public transaction bodies and client CHONK proofs propagate offchain, so withholding them can prevent permissionless proving; the affected pending checkpoints expire and are pruned rather than finalized.

Users can exit funds at any time because contracts are not upgradeable. Governance can register a new canonical rollup and bonus-instance validators automatically follow the latest version, but this does not mutate the current instance, its verifier, messaging contracts, or already-installed EscapeHatch. Governance can change bounded validator-entry parameters and can set the GSE proof-of-possession gas limit too low for new deposits; validators explicitly bound to this instance remain on it.

Checkpoint proposals come from the open sequencer set, with the escape hatch providing a bonded fallback if the sampled committees are censoring or unavailable. Anyone with access to the required hardware can submit epoch root proofs which finalize the proven checkpoints.