Wonderland Quarterly Update: Q4 2025

Aztec
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Introduction

Over the past quarter, the Wonderland team has focused on advancing privacy primitives, improving developer tooling, and building robust infrastructure for the Aztec ecosystem. Our work has spanned deep research into privacy-preserving standards and the tangible development of user-facing applications like Bridge and Seek. Below is a summary of our key achievements and our strategic objectives for the upcoming quarter.

:warning: Some project results aren’t published yet. We’re working to make all our research publicly available on the forum. If you have questions about a specific project, feel free to reach out. We’re happy to discuss it.

:hammer_and_wrench: Key Work Undertaken & Achievements

Development & Implementation

Bridge and Seek

Unlocks: Seamless Capital Entry & Exit. It enables users from any major chain (EVM) to onboard into Aztec without complex manual bridging or privacy leaks.

This quarter, we pivoted our strategy to focus on Near as a primary bridge provider to leverage their chain abstraction capabilities, while also developing integrations with Substance Labs. We built a comprehensive Swap UI which allows users to privately swap assets utilizing the available liquidity in other EVM compatible chains.

Relevant Links:

Web Boilerplate

Unlocks: Rapid Ecosystem Growth. It allows new developers to go from “zero to deployed private app” in minutes rather than days, standardized on best practices.

We released a Dynamic Contract UI that allows developers to load and interact with any contract via address and ABI, a Deployment UI with automatic parameter generation, and a Custom Aztec Wallet Selector to streamline wallet connection and management.

Relevant Links:

Bulloak Noir (Test Structure Generator)

Unlocks: Test-Driven Development (TDD). It automates the boilerplate of writing tests, encouraging developers to write robust test suites by generating the scaffolding from specifications.

We contributed to Bulloak, adding support for generating Noir test structures. This tool allows developers to write specifications in a simple tree-like format and automatically generate the corresponding test files and scaffolding, streamlining the testing workflow for Aztec smart contracts.

Relevant Links:

CAZT (Cast)

Unlocks: Power User & DevOps Workflows. It enables developers and automated scripts to manage keys, sign transactions, and decode data without relying on a GUI wallet, which is essential for CI/CD pipelines and advanced testing.

We are developing CAZT, a dedicated CLI tool for key generation, derivation, signing, and encryption. A key feature is the transaction decoder, which allows developers to identify and analyze relevant user transactions directly from the chain, streamlining debugging and account management.

Relevant Links:

Aztec Standards

Unlocks: Network Stability & Interoperability. It ensures that dApps built by different teams can interact reliably and that the network foundation is solid enough for complex production applications.

We managed the release of packages from v2.0.3, to devnet.6, ensuring stability for developers utilizing the standard.

Relevant Links:

Escrow

Unlocks: Private balance in contracts with custom unlock logic between a known amount of participants. This can unlock a lot of private financial primitives like vesting with custom unlock schedules.

We finalized a simple escrow standard that allows developers to write their own custom logic for unlocking funds and two example logic contracts (clawback and linear vesting) to make the contracts production-ready for real-world agreements. To validate these standards and stress-test our Web Boilerplate, we developed a reference UI implementation that allows users to create and manage private vesting schedules, serving as a blueprint for future DeFi applications on Aztec.

Relevant Links:

EIP-712 Clear Signing (Ethereum-Based Accounts)

Unlocks: Instant User Onboarding. It allows users to interact with Aztec using their existing Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) without needing to download specialized software or manage separate secrets.

We developed account contracts where Aztec keys are deterministically derived from Ethereum wallet signatures (EIP-712). This approach offloads secret handling to the user’s existing wallet and ensures that if a user retains their Ethereum keys, they can always recover their Aztec account. It removes the need for complex on-chain initialization steps for newcomers, effectively lowering the barrier to entry.

Relevant Links:

Initializerless Contracts

Unlocks: Simplified Aztec onboarding. By removing the need to send a transaction to create an account contract on Aztec, we can keep the whole process off-chain making it faster and easier for users to onboard.

We develop a new account contract that does not require the user to submit a transaction to initialize it. This means that users can start receiving funds immediately after locally computing their account contract.

Research & Exploration

Fee Payment Contract (FPC) Privacy

Unlocks: True Metadata Privacy. It closes the final gap in transaction anonymity by ensuring that paying for gas doesn’t reveal a user’s identity or transaction timing through public oracle data.

We researched private oracle models (e.g., Primus Labs ZK TLS) to prevent timing leaks and investigated funding mechanisms for flows from L1 to Aztec and L2-to-L2.

Shared Partial Notes

Unlocks: Private Exchange Rates & Trustless Collaboration. It enables multiple parties to contribute to a single state transition without revealing their individual contributions or the exact exchange rate used.

We conceptualized a shared partial note mechanism where a note is “split” between a creator and a completer. When completed, it generates separate output notes for each party (e.g., one for the amount and one for the change). This allows for privacy-preserving exchange rates where the exact swap ratio remains hidden. We also explored off-chain partial note initialization, which could eliminate the need for users to manually manage secrets and nullifiers for certain interactions.

Relevant Links:

x402 Standards (“Payment Required”)

Unlocks: New Economic Models. It enables “paywalls” and conditional logic for private smart contracts, allowing developers to build services that require payment (like HTTP 402) without revealing who is paying.

We architected implementation standards focusing on private-to-private transactions, defining how contracts can enforce payment conditions in a privacy-preserving manner.

Speculative Proving

Unlocks: Web2-like Responsiveness. It makes private applications feel snappy by pre-calculating heavy cryptographic proofs in the background, minimizing the time users spend waiting for a spinner.

We explored proof folding and methods to pre-compute internal calls that don’t require parameters. We also investigated wallet extensions and caching mechanisms to speed up the client-side generation process.

Multisig

Unlocks: Institutional & DAO Adoption. It provides the security guarantees required for organizations to manage shared treasuries and assets on a private chain.

We completed comprehensive research on implementing multisig schemes within a private environment and published our findings in a forum post to gather community feedback.

Relevant Links:

:rocket: Plans & Objectives for the Next Quarter

Building on our recent momentum, our primary objectives for the next quarter are production readiness, solving bootstrapping friction, and finalizing key integrations.

  • Bridge and Seek Production Readiness: We’re helping the Aztec Labs team deliver the production version of Bridge and Seek, along with side components that make user onboarding more seamless.
  • Fee Payment & Bootstrapping: We aim to solve the onboarding flow for new accounts and implement FPC funding flows (L1 → Aztec, L2 → L2). Funding Fee Juice is complex and leaks a lot of privacy so we are going to make this flow as private as possible.
  • Wallet & Authentication: We’ll continue polishing our EIP-712 implementation and publish it in a separate repository so other projects can use it.
  • Initializerless Contracts: We’ll move this into a production-ready, public repository that anyone can use to simplify account creation.
  • State Migration: We plan to implement version migration logic using portal minting rights, enabling seamless state transitions between Aztec versions.
  • Tooling: We’ll release more features for the CAZT CLI tool, making it the central hub for debugging Aztec transactions.
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Hey, We worked with Primus on the implementation of zkTLS for Aztec. Were there any particular findings that were of note during this research that Wonderland needs help with?

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Hi! thanks for extending a hand.

We don’t have any open questions at the time. We decided to design the FPC without using oracles for simplicity after some review.

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The rationale behind the oracle-less solution relies on reducing the gate-count (which has an impact on the proving time UX), and simplifying the flow, assuming 1:1 AZT → FJ conversion, and handling the conversion in L1 (separate user flow, probably routing it to Uniswap directly).

Any token conversion would require: a token transfer + a quote proof.

While providing a quote within Aztec network is possible, the privacy leak of which token is being swapped (users who use USDT have another privacy set than USDC, for example, and there could be many flavours of the same underlying token), and the configuration of the TLS, pushed us into going forward with the simplest solution as possible: keeping a BalanceNote within the contract, and a “top-up and spend later” flow.

In this way we’re both avoiding adding a token transfer to every tx, privacy fragmentation, and reducing the gate count of fee payment to just 100k gates.

As minim points, we don’t have any open questions so far, tho we appreciate the hand and will probably ping you when we find an application for the tech.