Whilst building @aztecnetwork, I have seen hundreds of token launches. Everything from the initial hype, the distribution & incentives to the creation of an asset, all fail to do the one thing they are supposed to, decentralise. Token launches are still broken in 2025. Airdrops are farmed. Token sales are dominated by sophisticated bidders or gas wars. And fair price discovery does non-existent. There are certain inflection points in life where you can pick the easy path, or the hard path. For the $AZTEC token launch, there wasn’t any other option. Launching a network that is designed to power privacy for all of Web3 via centralised rails was a non-starter and against everything Aztec is built to fix. So we took a different path – a path that actually uses blockchains for what they were built for. A path with a simple ethos – be fair, open and transparent. Do everything possible on-chain. The $AZTEC launch puts our community first. It lays the foundation for the next decade of private transactions and decentralises ownership, governance and economics from day 1. To get there we had to solve two problems: 1. Distribution mechanics 2. Global access (while preventing Sybills and enforcing sanctions compliance) For distribution mechanics, we partnered with the amazing team at @Uniswap on the new continuous clearing auction format (CCA). The CCA ensures fair access, reduces gas wars and promotes real price discovery. Aztec’s CCA auction has a floor price $350M and will sell up to 14.95% of the Total Supply using transparent on-chain clearing directly on Ethereum mainnet. A further 2.64% of the network is then automatically allocated through community participation to a Uniswap V4 pool at the final clearing price. Enabling liquidity for network operators. Aztec’s CCA auction uses hooks to make two additions – a community whitelist that enables pre-bids and sanctions compliance using @ZKPassport and @0xPredicate. The whitelist ensures our community gets exclusive access to bidding ahead of the first day of the auction. ZkPassport, lets you do privacy preserving sanctions checks directly with a smart contract. Your identity data never leaves your phone and your passport information can’t be lost in a data breach. The future is here and it's going to be private. I would like to thank all the teams that helped us get here. Aztec’s investors for making this possible @a16zcrypto, @paradigm, @consensys, @join_ef and many more. Finally, thank you to our community for believing in a different path. Challenge the status quo. The ticker is $AZTEC.