Aztec Labs buys ZKPassport maker Obsidion, keeps code open

Aztec Labs has acquired Obsidion, the developer of the privacy-preserving identity tool ZKPassport. Aztec said it will keep the ZKPassport protocol and its iOS iPhone app open source while the Obsidion team joins Aztec to continue development.

Obsidion co-founders Michael Elliot and Theo Madzou and the rest of the team will move into Aztec Labs to work on ZKPassport and other products. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Aztec completed a token sale in December that raised roughly $60 million worth of ether, on top of about $125 million in earlier venture funding from investors including a16z and Paradigm and contributions tied to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

ZKPassport lets users prove attributes such as age, nationality or “proof of humanity” without revealing other personal details. The app uses on-device scanning of passport or government ID NFC chips to generate a cryptographic signature. That signature can be used to verify specific claims without exposing identifying data.

The technology has seen limited but notable use. ZKPassport was available as an option for Devconnect conference ticket processing and was used in Aztec’s identity checks for a community token sale. Aztec reported that passport checks verified nationalities for about 17,000 token-sale participants.

Aztec is developing a privacy-focused, decentralized Layer 2 zk-rollup on Ethereum intended to provide programmable privacy for smart contracts. The project launched an Ignition Chain in mid-November that it described as a fully decentralized L2; around 136 nodes are running the network. Aztec positions the network as a computation layer that lets developers hide some data, user identities and parts of computation while revealing other information when needed.

Aztec supports privacy applications such as StealthNote, a messaging tool, and uses Noir, a zero-knowledge programming language, to enable private smart-contract logic.

In a statement, Aztec Labs CEO Joe Andrews called the Obsidion product “rare” and wrote that proving attributes without revealing personal data is how verification infrastructure should work as governments consider online age-verification standards.

The Obsidion acquisition occurs while some crypto projects are being bought by larger firms and others are shrinking or shutting down amid market and revenue pressures. Aztec said it intends to maintain ZKPassport as an open-source protocol and will keep the iOS mobile client under an open-source model. The Obsidion founders will join Aztec’s development efforts and the company may apply the verification tool to future product and compliance workflows. Other details of the agreement were not provided.