- The service will stop accepting deposits on March 21
- Users will have a year to withdraw funds
- Journalists attribute this to regulatory pressure on developers
This morning, March 13, the Aztec team announcedthat by the end of the month, the Connect protocol will not accept new deposits. Users have a whole year to withdraw funds through the official sequencer.
Aztec Connect is the level of encryption for Ethereum. At the time of the presentation in July last year, the authors described it as a kind of VPN analogue.
In fact, this is an ideological continuation of zk.money, another encryption shell from Aztec Team. But, apparently, the project was recognized as unpromising.
Journalist Colin Wu in his blog expressed another theory as to why the service is being closed. Allegedly, this is due to the growing regulatory pressure on encryption protocols.
One way or another, from March 21, the Aztec Connect bridge will stop accepting deposits from both zk.money and other interfaces. Users will then have a year, until March 21, 2024, to withdraw all funds.
Then the developer sequencer will be disabled. But this does not mean the complete elimination of the Connect protocol. His repository is in the public domain.
Users will be able to use the bridge further, but with a private, community-supported sequencer. How reliable the service will be in this case, one can only guess.
